It Pays to be Humble…

A Story from 15 Years ago

Early years of 2010s – Cant recall exact year

I was a General surgical registrar and was attending College of Surgeons Sri Lanka sessions and there was session on Hepatobilliary surgery.

At the end a Shiek gentleman from the back row politely introduced himslef and asked some questions from the visiting “expert” and thanked him for his replies. Nothing out of the ordinary – May be a Visiting consultant from a peripheral unit in India I thought…

Next day I was surprised to see the same man doing a Plenary lecture – Aravind Singh Soin …great talk, to the point. Not only till I googled him later that I relaised this polite unassuming man has performed more than 3500 living donor liver transplants in India which is the highest in the country, and the second-highest in the world! Probabaly more than whole of the liver surgeons in that room , including the visiting expert, combined !!

Moral of the story is it pays to be Humble…..

PS – What prompted me to write this is I was teaching in course recently and , while most of the partcipants were great, one trainee , an ST4 from Wales, really stood out.For those not familiar with uk training system ST stands for Speciality Trainee and starts from ST 3 to ST 8…so he was a very very junior trainee starting his surgical career.

He had his own opinion on everything we taught, He was so experieneced that he probably had nothing to learn, probabaly could teach next time. Little lunch time chat, as I happened to sit at his table at lunch, was illuminating for me – He talked ill of training in the rest of the world, including Pakistan where he was originally from, and in his own opinion , there would be nothing that he could not do after CCT and he would be far superior to his colleagues doing FCPS back home. Suffice it to say it was even more illuminating when the course director discussed each candidates experience and future golas at the end of the course…He had done less than 60 appendicectomies….Femoral hernias were less than the number of fingers of one of his hands ;)These are the most basic General surgical operations, not Liver transplants…and I leave it to your judgement about the descrepancy between his judgement of his own ability and experience and reality. If this is his arrogance now, I cant imagine his arrogance when he finishes training.

What can i say….My mind immmediately went back to Aravind Singh Soin 🙂 I recal the saying ” Empty Vessels Make most noise” , exactly the case here.

To all surgical trainees , and for that matter, to all Surgeons,  I would highly recommend being Humble….Dont make the stupid mistake of thinking you are the best of the best or no one is better than you. There are, and there will always be, people better than you. People who have gone very far and achieved great heights, like Aravind Singh Soin, are often unassuming and humble…

Save yourself the embarassment of being Arrogant and having to “eat humble pie” once you are proven wrong! Be humble….it pays to do so!!

Safe surgery till we meet again 🙂

LBS