Physician Underdog: Leveraging the underdog mentality to move forward

Often, for me, the best ideas come out of extreme situations in unknown terrain, whether in cycling or in business. Pushing beyond what I think I can do creates an opening for new ideas.

If you want to be at a particular table, do what you need to get there. If you can’t get to where you want to be, build a table.

As I look back on my life, I realize that every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being redirected to something better.

People often mistake entrepreneurship as a career path, when it is truly a mindset to find fulfillment with taking action towards making something better for the world.

As a new leader or entrepreneur, rather than having a crystal ball and knowing the future of your company, your job as a leader should be to design the systems to allow for discovery. Planning for discovery is a powerful way to help us navigate through uncertainty and can make organizations nimble and powerful.

Every human has four endowments; self-awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom. The power to choose, to respond, to change.

And then there is the most dangerous risk of all—the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.

Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.