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