Theodore Schwartz: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think neurosurgeons are a group of people with excess self-confidence? The stakes are so high. It’s so nerve-wracking. You had to get through a lot of years of work even to get there. It’s funny you mention it. My brother-in-law who works at Goldman Sachs was telling me that he was at some meeting where someone was giving them a lecture about ego and confidence, and you can imagine Wall Street traders have a lot of ego and confidence. The conclusion was that neurosurgeons have more ego and confidence than any of the Wall Street traders. The way I talk about it is, you have to, at the same time, have confidence and humility. You have to combine the two, and it’s very difficult to do. Yes, you have to have a certain amount of confidence to tell someone sitting in front of you, “I want you to trust me with the most important thing that you possess, which is your brain and your health. You’re going to basically go to sleep and give it to me for four hours and put it under my care, and I’m going to do some risky stuff. You need to have that done, and I have to have the confidence to say I’m the best person to do this or I’m one of the best people to do this for you.” You have to feel that and you have to earn that. At the same time, when you make a mistake, and it doesn’t come out the way you wanted — and that will inevitably happen to everyone — you have to have the humility to say, “What did I do wrong? How can I do it better?” You also have to have the honesty to say to your patients, “Look, I’m going to do my best for you. That I can promise you, but these are the risks, and these are the known risks.” Because if you’re too confident, you get to be arrogant. If you’re arrogant, then you’re telling your patients that they’re going to do perfect. You’re lying to them, and then you don’t change. You don’t look introspectively when you make mistakes and say, “All right, this wasn’t perfect. How am I going to do this better next time? ” I think you have to be confident, but you have to be humble at the same time, and you have to have just that right balance. The neurosurgeons who are quite self-confident — do you think that’s compartmentalized? Or do you think they’re generally quite confident in many other spheres of life?…

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