Invisible Forces How They Can Shape a Career

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i’m dave langer um i’m the chairman of

neurosurgery at linux hill hospital

uh part of the northwell health system

i’ve been here since 2013.

uh you may remember me from lenox hills

from netflix lenox hill in which i

participated as a neurosurgeon

i’m looking forward to talking to you

today about how invisible forces

can shape your career you know basically

what i realized

very early on in my life is that doing

the right thing is what matters

no matter what that there are many

influences we have on ourselves from

very early on that incentivize

selfishness

and maybe even incentivize cheating or

doing things that aren’t ethical

to get ahead but what i realized very

early on is that what’s most important

in the end is doing the right thing that

you may not be as successful as quickly

but in the end you can live with

yourself and live with the people around

you and people respect you for that

and while it may slow your ascent down

your upside is much higher

so how do invisible forces affect us

well i was reading an article this

just this past week in the new york

times about the fact that

there are going to be approximately 300

000 left

births this year in the united states

due to covet and that doesn’t even

include canada

but when you start thinking about that

why is that

well i actually thought there might be

more births this year because people are

spending so much time at home it turns

out that during pandemics even during

the

1918 pandemic the same exact thing

happened

that’s primarily because it’s economic

when people are losing money when

they’re under stress they tend to

have fewer children and in fact what was

more interesting than that was there was

a paragraph in this in this op-ed piece

about how not only were these

relationships that already existed

people are going to have less children

but just the very fact there was a

pandemic

there are less collisions there are less

people meeting for the first time

less of these relationships that form

from nothing

and it got me thinking about myself and

the invisible forces not only that led

to my career success

but to just the fact that i existed on

this earth because there are actually

souls out there that will never exist

because of covet

that never happened because two people

never met

and you have to realize that ultimately

that’s why we’re all here

that our very existence is somewhat

chaotic and lucky

well how did i get lucky and how do you

make the most out of your luck

the answer is that as you progress

through your career the relationships

matter it’s so important your career is

starting right now

though with the people you meet your

professors your colleagues

whoever your your whoever’s training you

be kind

honesty pays off work hard observe the

people and the process

the other issue is we have a tendency to

always look at what other people are

doing

and use that as somehow a motivation

that if you see

what someone else is doing that can

somehow help you i just i tend to

disagree

you know i was a rower in college and in

in rowing you’re rolling with your back

to the finish line you’re pulling as

hard as you can

the truth is during a race the last

thing you want to do is look out of the

boat at your competition

because if you’re looking out of the

boat what are you not doing

you’re not paying attention to your work

and you can only slow yourself down

that actually holds for what we do every

day that as long as you work as hard as

you can

and do things to make you successful

that’s all you can do

to guarantee your future success and

there’s no reason to look out of the

boat

you know when i look think back to back

to medical school

and back to my early time as a

neurosurgery resident

i met a woman named kate currico and

kate was a

the most intense brilliant scientist i’d

ever met

and i just was astounded by how

brilliant she was and she taught me

so many different things well at that

time she was working on mrna

as a drug and i really got into this and

was helping to develop some of the early

science of how we can get an rna

molecule into a cell

it’s challenging and i kate and i worked

together on some of the early science of

how to do this and in fact

made some of the early contributions

together to how to get rna to work as a

drug well

fast forward kate probably would win the

nobel prize this year

she and her partner drew weissman made a

seminal discovery around 2003 to 2005

of how to stabilize rna and it’s led

directly

directly to the rna vaccines of pfizer

and moderna and i got exposed that and

what kate taught me was the importance

of an appropriate control

the importance of really accepting your

data for what they are

and not hallucinating that to make your

idea make sense

it goes back to doing the right thing

it’s a it’s a component of doing good

science and because she’s such an

incredible scientist

she saved the world and i was just a

small part of that

the next way i think about it is over

the years i’ve met some wonderful

neurosurgeons as

after my residency two of the guys were

actually in buffalo and they were

the leaders of catheter-based treatment

of vascular disease well

about 10 years after my residency

finished i realized that all this

catheter-based technology was really

the future i was a an excellent open

vascular neurosurgeon

but needed to learn the new techniques

in order to stay up to speed on what was

going on in my business and i reached

out to them

in buffalo and i asked if i could train

with them and lo and behold because the

relationship i had with them they let me

come up there three days a week

for almost a year and a half and i would

leave new york city

early in the morning on wednesday or

late tuesday night

fly across long island up to buffalo

arrive in

sometimes the bitter cold and go to work

for three days and i would come back on

the weekends and work on the weekends

and i did this just so i could get

trained

ultimately the one of the fellows i met

there

when we both finished he asked me if i

wanted to get involved in this really

neat project about a thing called a

video exoscope

and i just bit line and sinker and i

went to japan with him

and helped this define a new way of

doing surgery

and lo and behold that led to this

exposure

and this amazing field of exoscopic

neurosurgery

that there was actually an article about

this the new york times about what we

were doing

and more importantly it led me uh to

lennox hill

and i’ll get into that in a second you

know along the way during

during all this time i got really

involved in other types of technology

and those technologies included the idea

of bringing the social media aspects of

my life and my children’s life

to the bedside when we treat patients at

the point of care

and in fact back in 2007 my early

partner and i can court visit

apple computer in infinite loop at their

original headquarters

and started normalizing this diet idea

with people on apple healthcare

well fast forward to just this past few

years i went back to apple

i visited their new amazing new office

with my two partners in playback health

which has become

them probably i think the most could

become the most impactful

mobile app in healthcare that what we’re

doing is we’re creating an app

that can deliver videos audios

text write to a patient’s cell phone and

it in it we think it could

extraordinarily impact

communication and the patient experience

uh because of all this these

relationships that i’ve developed over

the years

you know the last relationship that

mattered to me was a guy named eras

nosek erez is a

fighter pilot and in the israeli air

force

and he became a neurosurgeon and i

trained him i taught him how to do these

complicated bypass surgeries

and eras and i went to israel together

to do some of these and met his

fighter pilot buddies and i gave one of

them in lenox neurosurgery hat well

he went up in his fighter jet and sent

me a picture of that hat

but more importantly erez had been in

the precursor of lennox hill the show

in israel there was a show called ehilov

in israel that was that was immediate

hit

and the israeli filmmakers came to the

u.s

and they wanted to do the same show in

the u.s and era said

why don’t you talk to langer and he

wouldn’t have done that if

i hadn’t been an honest broker with him

hadn’t been always

trying to help him get be successful and

i always live by the

the idea of following your north star

that you know we’re

we’re given many opportunities in life

that are often selfish our sat scores

our a c

t scores our grades our how we the

committees we’re on

the opportunities we get and these are

often very personal and they’re about me

me me

in fact in surgery it’s very selfish i

gotta train to be the best

well a north star concept is when we

focus on our ideas and we surround our

surround people around us help us build

those concepts and build those ideas

well eras was one of them and that’s the

north star idea

because you can be a gold star leader

and get the gold star stuff done

but in healthcare especially while you

may need some gold star stuff

it’s always important to have a north

star because the core principles of

success

and leadership are having that north

star concept

be fearless embrace your competition

surround yourself with terrific talented

people perhaps people that are more

talented than you are

and take some risk accept failure focus

on

long-term goals because ultimately your

ego is the enemy

you know my my partners are my some of

my closest friends

and have had a big contribution to my

life and my success i could never have

done it without them

and certainly i i always additionally

talk about the idea

of always going for your future and

looking at the rainbows in life and

falling rainbows and chasing rainbows

unfortunately there will be bumps in the

road and there will be things that

happen to you

that are unfortunate but you have to

bounce back and you get up to get up off

your back

and and start over you know the final

thing that ultimately this entire thing

led to

was my own relationship with my own

family

i was actually the new york times

followed me around just because to see

what i do on sundays

and while that was a lot of that was

great for your ego ultimately it led me

back to what was the most important

relationship in your wife was your

signifi with your life as your

significant other

that is the invisible force that

ultimately is the next generation

because that’s the collision that led to

my children

so my these invisible forces affect us

they infect

our our ability to make decisions they

affect

the relationships we have they affect

their careers

and they affect our families and i

couldn’t be more grateful to speak to

you about this today

and maybe contribute to some of your

invisible forces thank you

you