As a surgeon you have to have a controlled arrogance. If it's uncontrolled, you kill people, but you have to be pretty arrogant to saw through a person's chest, take out their heart and believe you can fix it. Then, when you succeed and the patient survives, you pray, because it's only by the grace of God that you get there.
Interpretation
Surgeons need a balanced confidence to perform life-saving operations, knowing that their skills must be tempered with humility and gratitude.
In this quote, Mehmet Oz emphasizes the necessity for surgeons to possess a certain level of arrogance or confidence to undertake the daunting task of performing surgery. This 'controlled arrogance' allows them to believe in their abilities to save lives, while at the same time recognizing the fragile nature of life and the role of a greater power in their successes. Ultimately, it highlights the balance between self-assuredness and humility that is crucial in high-stakes professions such as medicine.
In practice
In a graduation speech to medical students, to inspire them about the balance needed in their future careers.
What we have now is doctors who are actually better technically at what they're doing in their specialty than 30 or 40 years ago, but we lost the relationship, when the doctor would look people in the eye and say, 'I care about you. We can do this together.'
As we get better at understanding how little we know about the body, we begin to realize that the next big frontier in medicine, is energy medicine. It's not the mechanistic part of the joints moving. It's not the chemistry of our body. It's understanding for the first time how energy influences how we feel.
Whatever happens, do not lose hold of the two main ropes of life - hope and faith.
At the top of the mountain we are all snow leopards.
But individuals and firms spend an enormous amount of resources acquiring information, which affects their beliefs; and actions of others too affect their beliefs.
If you find yourself in some difficulty, step aside, and allow Buddha to take your place. The Buddha is in you.
Problems will disappear as darkness disappears with the onset of light.
We need to regularly stop and take stock; to sit down and determine within ourselves which things are worth valuing and which things are not; which risks are worth the cost and which are not. Even the most confusing or hurtful aspects of life can be made more tolerable by clear seeing and by choice.
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