A couple years ago my friend Amulya attended a summer seminar by a surgeon, Alfredo Quinones. It turned out that Alfredo is one of the most inspiring people alive. I’ll just steal Amulya’s description:
Speaking of absolutely brilliant people, I recently met one of the most inspirational, incredible, amazing, bright people I think I will ever meet in my life. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa. Seriously, all I want is for you to meet him. Everything he talks about resonates with everything I've heard from you about wanting to be a doctor. Basically read this article to learn about him.
He's a doctor at Johns Hopkins who does brain surgery. His story is absolutely ridiculous, but more importantly he's just a great guy. He teaches part of a class going on here and he was just so friendly and really made me feel welcome. It's a graduate level class, I'm not even enrolled, and he's standing next to me explaining stuff about the brain and the nervous system and brain tumors and he's basically a world-renowned surgeon. He gave this talk later that night that I went to, and it was basically just an inspirational talk about giving everything your best, and I've heard that talk a million times, but he's living proof of it.
He was an illegal immigrant worker who went to Harvard Medical School and now is one of the most famous surgeons in the world. He single-handedly made me reconsider going into medicine just so I could help people like he does. As soon as I met him I was like, "Ken would love this guy."
Alfredo pursues what is described as, “A punishing clinical and research workload,” and he does this out of a deep sense of gratitude. One patient that Alfredo treated remains etched in his memory. A teenage patient who was just accepted at UC-Berkeley, the first one in his family to go to college, the beaming pride of his entire family. The patient had a brain tumor that slowly wasted his body away and killed him within a year.
Alfredo knows the life he used to live on the farmlands, and he knows the life he lives now at Johns Hopkins. He knows he could have just as easily ended up on that ICU bed with an untreatable brain tumor. He has been given such an opportunity, and though he may never be able to return the favor to the incredible people he met along the way, he might be able to pay it forward and give back to humanity. It strikes me, in this six page profile, that all he wants from life is to give back.
Amulya was right, I do love this guy. I especially love his drive, but not necessarily his level of drive. I think I am ambitious now, and I think at times I pursued what I could justify describing as a “punishing” workload. But I did this mostly out of pride.
I want others to see how good I am. I want to be the best. Basically, I want to be better than you. Though sometimes I think, “Well, drive is just drive,” this sort of selfish drive just can’t be sustained. Or at least in my experience, I ran out of it.
It’s pretty much my dream to be driven in the way Alfredo speaks of drive. To have such a perspective of gratitude and to operate from such a humble base. How amazing.
And if you can’t be inspiring and nice to people along the way, what’s the point? I mean, nobody would write an inspiring profile about a jerk, right?
from ken
Are you thinking about something? Write about it and post it here! Email me! ken.e.noguchi@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment