From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Surgery, like many other disciplines, is primarily about facts, your relationship with the facts, how you manage, handle, interpret and use those facts. This is something we all begin to do very early in life, in our childhood.
Emotional intelligence however is a skill that is learned and learnable. We learn it in life- and we can be trained in it. It's not enough to have someone come and talk to your team about why it's important however, it's something that needs practice, something that you have to work at.
Speaking about the demand side… we have skills and techniques in drug prevention and thousands of advisors have been trained by our programmes around the world to work in the community at school level, especially with children. Children are the most vulnerable group, and we must do our utmost to protect them.
The absolute focus must be on reducing inequality. This means creating strategies which provide economic opportunity - investing in industries that provide employment rather than profit, investing in education, and providing a fairer deal for those who form the labour force.
At Stanford University School of Medicine, we seek individuals who are not only masters in their current roles but also visionaries passionate about shaping the future of their fields. We value those who strive to turn their visions into reality. Moreover, we prioritise collaboration. It's crucial to have team members who, while honing their skills daily, are also bold enough to think outside the box—or even question its existence.
As an entrepreneur, I got my education out in the world – real life learning is the way forward for young entrepreneurs. And this is what we must encourage and support.
We all have the opportunity to be on the level of Da Vinci or Franklin because we all have access to so many different forms of knowledge. Those who study philosophy, the arts and sciences together can make connections at that very high level.
Don't aspire to be an entrepreneur. Aspire to create something that solves a problem. My message to young people with an idea is build a prototype and test it. Test it again and again, making the changes, learning from failure.
We are all creative beings, but we're brought up being told not to colour outside the lines – but why? It's OK to be different…. It's more than OK to be different, and we need to encourage that.
All ideas and questions might be very interesting, and children has to experience that their questions are equally valued as those coming from a grown up or a Nobel Prize winner.
If you know something, and if the reason you're confident is that I told you that thing? That means I wasn't a good educator at that moment because you decided that based on some authority figure, something is real, or true. Instead, an educator should teach you how to think about a problem – how to come to some form of understanding.
There are a high number of young people who want to set-up businesses, but there is a huge gap between their aspirations/intentions and the actual delivery of setting up a business…. More so with the young than any other age group.