Failure: Why it's the key to real innovation and achievement

Good day and welcome to Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul. And today we are going to talk about failure. It's a happy, happy topic, I know. And I think we're going to try and put a good spin on the idea of failure. But, you know, You know, whether you're looking at things going on currently and current events when this is being broadcast in November, or, you know, wherever you are in the future listening, I think, you know, failure is one of those things that's part of the human condition, and we all experience it. Sometimes we experience it repeatedly. In fact, I think it's more normal to experience failure repeatedly than successes. And The purpose of wanting to talk about this today is not really to make it specific to any current events, because as we know, people are listening in the future as well, but to kind of bring up a conversation that went on that with myself and some other people where People have repeatedly asked, well, okay, so you're, you know, you're at, you know, let's assume I'm living for a while longer and all of that. You're, you're at, you know, sort of the, the later middle or later part of your career, and you've done a lot of things. You've taught a lot of people. You've, you've written a number of books. You've written a lot more things that, you know, only professionals see. You know, a lot of things. Seems like in, you know, within the world of your little piece of medicine, you're, you know, you're a successful person. How did you get there? And how did that happen? And you often hear, and there are quotes by many, many famous people, including like Winston Churchill, I think, you know, once said, Well, you just keep failing. And he never actually said you succeed. He says, you just keep failing and then things happen. So sometimes that comes up. And I think what triggered the idea for the program's topic today was I've been on a lot of podcasts and interviews and some TV shows and some other things. Many of them have been since COVID started talking about immunotherapies or IV vitamin C or other things related to COVID, but there've been a lot of other ones related either to book release or cancer-specific topics and clinical medicine, et cetera. And I think that the important part around all of this is many of the people, when we talk and we go through and, you know, there's an interview that they'll say, well, is there some, you know, was there some path you followed or was there some driving force that took you where you were? going or where you are now. And I think that it becomes a, you know, larger metaphor, hopefully, for not just, you know, me answering that question about myself, but for whatever way you want to apply it. Moving forward in life, you know, we kind of have just a few choices. We can certainly move forward, but kind of stay the same and do nothing and just let life happen to us. And there are times in everyone's life where that happens. We can, you know, take advantage of things that go right when they do and maximize those and try and minimize all the things that don't go right. That's a strategy that a lot of people have. But, you know, somewhere between the time where you're, you know, born and working on your life and You know, and before you pass away and leave this life, you have a lot of opportunities to either, you know, do, do something with what you're given or not. And I think that one of these— sometimes it surprises interviewers when they'll ask, well, did you, you know, did you start out and want to really, you know, get into and be expert at treating cancer and chronically ill people? And the surprising part, usually I'll say is no, actually, that's not how I started at all. The way that I started that led to all of this work with, you know, the severely chronically ill and people with cancer is I really wanted to be kind of a more traditional family practice doctor, which is what I was when I started. And yet I didn't want to be limited to just the world of allopathic medicine. That's great. If you need, you know, an antibiotic to kill something, it's wonderful for that. If you need to, you know, fix a broken leg or get surgery or do other stuff, it's great for that. So I appreciated it and I used all of that stuff as part of the allopathic world of medicine. But I wanted to have a lot more so-called tools in the toolbox. And so practicing integrative medicine and practicing as a naturopathic medical doctor, what it added was I did a lot of things that included botanical or herbal medicines, a lot of nutritional interventions, nutritional medicine, which includes both diet therapy, but also nutrient therapies, sort of a couple of pathways you can go there. In the earlier days, I did a lot of what's known as physical medicine. That would be some crossover between what, say, the osteopathic doctors might do, physical manipulation, physical therapy, and a lot of interventional physical medicine, meaning a lot of injection therapies, a lot of joint injections, soft tissue injections, and worked into prolotherapy and what are now known as regenerative injections. When I started doing that, it was really kind of an out-there cowboy part of orthopedic medicine. medicine that people would do regenerative type injections. And, you know, now it's kind of all the rage. But the other thing that happened very, very quickly, because I wanted to do family practice, and that was, of course, something that's in your mind, is often, you know, you, you have your idea of the way that that's going to play out. And so what was in my mind is, well, I'm going to do family practice. And I'm going to see everyone from, you know, babies to adults and elderly, and just treat what I see and treat what comes in, but I'm going to have all these extra sort of tools that I do. But what started to happen very, you know, quickly, because we're talking about, you know, a few decades ago, where there were less people who were, you know, let's say, well-known doing, you know, integrative therapies or working as naturopathic medical doctors or other things that you know, that are more common nowadays. There were very few people like that doing that back then. And so, for example, when it came to injection therapies for orthopedics that were not just steroids, which is— that's— I was trained originally in, you know, in general medicine, you know, surgery and injection therapies and stuff to use, you know, steroids and all that and anesthesia. But when we started to use regenerative type injections, say prolotherapy type things that have certainly evolved a lot now, you know, to what the people do now, that was very unique. So we started to get a lot of, you know, referrals for people coming in for that. And so what happens is you start out with this idea that, well, I'm going to do kind of general family medicine, which I did do a lot of. I had a lot of, you know, the whole family would would come in, a lot of pediatrics and a lot of the moms and dads and later a fair number of, you know, older folks and everything. But then you start to have these changes that go on just organically because of some of the choices you've made. So, you know, one of those choices being getting into, you know, the expanded part of orthopedics of regenerative injections and regenerative therapies for joint problems. That took on a life of its own. So now, in addition to families, I start getting, you know, athletes and, you know, people who are in their 40s or 50s and want to keep the joints, you know, working as well as they can while they do their stuff or, you know, recover from an injury. So that, you know, added a whole new dimension to the practice. You know, one of the reasons you practice medicine is you're never done. You never learn everything, and there's always something new to come along. Well, at the same time I was doing this sort of foray into the more broad world of orthopedics and regenerative joint things, there was also a parallel thing going on, which was very, pretty much from the very beginning of my practice, I had also done a lot of nutrient-type injections. So, you know, a lot of people have heard of you go in and, you know, you get a B12 shot or something like that, or a B vitamin shot. So that was certainly a part of it. There's also— oh, we would do nowadays, but back then you do a mixture of nutrients in a bigger syringe and put it into a vein with a, you know, short intravenous therapy, or you do a longer intravenous therapy with a, you know, an IV bag that has various nutrients in it. And so it was doing a lot of that, and that came about kind of like the regenerative injection thing, where people were coming in and they had a chronic illness. Right. and they said, you know, we heard you do, you know, more than the average general practitioner. Do you, you know, can you, I'd really like to try IV nutrient therapy because I've got chronic pain or I've got fibromyalgia or I've got, you know, you fill in the blank, whatever going on. And the answer would be sure, you know, why not? And, you know, if you look at IV, you know, just like you, if you look at regenerative injection therapy for orthopedics, like prolotherapy and PRP and all the stuff that goes on now, it's a whole different world than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Kind of the same with IV nutrient therapy. We knew, you know, certain things, we had certain things that we did that were, you know, worked out pretty good. But they were really very much in their infancy if you go back to that time period compared to what we know now and what, you know, people like myself and others teach doctors to do nowadays. So it very much started because of people saying, you know, they had a perceived need for something. And I appeared to offer that in the medical practice that I was running, and were willing to, you know, give it a try. Well, very, very quickly, and literally, this is, you know, in the beginning, really, you know, to me, not the first week, but in the very early part of the first year of my practice, started getting these things. And I I really wouldn't have imagined going in thinking, well, I'm going to do general practice with this really broad group of tools. I wouldn't have thought, you know, those things would have probably taken off like they did because the other thing to keep in mind, it's, you know, things are time and era appropriate. Nowadays, if you go into practice and you do things like IV nutrient therapy and prolotherapy, regenerative injections, there's a lot of market demand for it by patients because people know about it. You know, back Back then, very few people knew it was even a possibility to do. So that changes things quite a bit. So there was a lot of just organic growth based on the needs of people or the perceived needs of people. And what that led to then was trying things, doing nutrient therapy formulas with people with fibromyalgia, chronic pain, etc., and then moving to doing, you know, supportive therapies for people who were undergoing chemotherapy. Yeah. therapy and all of that. And, you know, I brought up the idea of failing in the beginning, you know, that in, in working with humans in medicine, your, your goal, of course, is not to fail, but there are always things that go better and worse within the realm of doing things, you know, in the correct manner. And when you have something that's evolving, like Intravenous therapies, you can do them completely safely. Nobody gets hurt. There's no problems. You get the desired benefit. But there's always probably a better way, a way to improve it. So the idea of failure in that context is not that bad things happen and you did it really wrong. It's just that the way that we knew to do things, say, 25 years ago was at a certain level, you know, as far as the, the art of the science. And what we know to do now is at a different level. And the reason it's at a different level is those of us who were doing it long ago looked and said, well, this was working, but can we make it work better? Or is there a difference in what we would do for somebody who's got fibromyalgia versus somebody who's recovering from surgery but otherwise healthy? versus a patient who just got done having chemotherapy. Maybe there's something different we can do for each of those groups of folks. And so there was, you know, not an overt failure as far as, well, that was really bad with that patient, but it was more, why don't we improve what we're doing? So the idea of, you know, failure is really relative. Sometimes there is failure in— and this is another area that grew very quickly that I wasn't expecting in my practice, and that is the area of the chronically ill. So I've mentioned fibromyalgia, people with very advanced autoimmune diseases and other chronic illness that the, you know, the standard allopathic means of treating were more symptomatic and they wanted to see if they could get at, you know, deeper levels of their illness. Wasn't really expecting to get a lot of those folks. Well, in that respect, the evolution of knowledge, if you take someone who's chronically ill or somebody dealing with cancer, There were not, you know, as much failures in the sense where somebody gets hurt, but there are things that you try based on the science at the time, and they may not work very well. They don't hurt anybody, but they didn't help a whole lot. So the idea of failure there was really an idea of continuous improvement. So if you look at the state of our knowledge of what to do with complex chronic illness folks or people with cancer, you know, 25 or 30 years ago, Now it's light years different, partly because the science evolved, but also because of the other effects I was telling you, where you had a grand expansion of those of us who were doing it, trying to continuously improve, but also new doctors coming in and new healthcare practitioners coming in who wanted to build on the knowledge we had. And you always start With something. You know, there, there are a few things I've thought up completely out on my own, but normally you start somewhere with something someone's done before. So there are, for instance, in intravenous therapy, there's a couple of people, if you're into that world, who are kind of famous from a bygone era. There's Dr. Frederick Klenner with a K. He practiced in the South and he did a lot of work with intravenous vitamin C and oral vitamin C. and he wrote up his findings. And he was quite, you know, quite well known for that. And truly a pioneer who— there was very, very few people back then in those days, during and after World War II, who were doing this. There are people from even before that who were doing other types of therapies that, you know, we have articles from the Southern Medical Journal from the '20s and '30s and '40s. And then there are people like the famous Dr. Myers. Some of you hear of an IV called the Myers cocktail. Well, there was really a Dr. Myers, and he was doing that with a lot of people. He was doing it a lot with elderly folks, especially people in nursing homes, et cetera. And he kind of came up with a nutrient combination that would, you know, help people, especially people who were ill and, you know, depleted. So a lot of, you know, where modern IV nutrient therapy came from were people like that who had put some some landmarks and some stakes down in the medical literature, or later it got in the literature, and then a lot of us sort of built on that. So you're always building on something. And there are things being done today that build on, you know, the things that myself and other people sort of took the next step, you know, 20 years ago with. So that's just a natural evolution. We, of course, 20 or 30 years ago, or back in the days of Myers and Klenner, Would they have liked to have known the stuff we know now and, you know, improve and do broader things? Sure, we all would. I, 20 years ago, I would have loved to know what I know now, but we didn't. So I want to say that when we talk, especially in, you know, help in the helping profession, we talk about failure. It's not really that, you know, you did something wrong that harms somebody. That's, that's a different problem. But you did the best you could within the science that you had at the time and the clinical experience you had at the time. And it just wasn't maybe what you wanted. It didn't kind of come out the way you wanted and didn't help as much. And so you jump to the next level. So I think the concept of— because I was asked it so many times this week in interviews, you know, how did you get into working with so many people with chronic illness and cancer? And where did the ideas come from and all that? That really is something that I was not anticipating going forward. And so one of the things that comes up too is if you're looking back, and this doesn't just apply to medicine, it applies to anything. If you look back and you've made particular choices in, you know, career choices, education, knowledge areas and stuff, that can set you up for things you may or may not be You know, thinking are going to come your way professionally or in your work or even in non-work situations. If I were to sit down and list out the things that, you know, when I started practice, I thought I was going to be doing versus what I was doing 5 years later, I would probably have been correct about maybe 15 or 20% of the things. Everything else. was a wonderful grand surprise. Now, the other side of the surprise is the failure part of the equation where you're doing things that not a lot of other people are doing. There's not a super big roadmap that you have to, you know, to build on. You have some real little nascent sort of ideas. You have some safety parameters to work in and And then you go. And, you know, to this day, but in those days especially, we were very open and honest with patients that, look, this is, you know, we're working off the main menu now. This is not part of what you'd get at a hospital or even most other clinics in town. It's, we can do this safely. We have a little information about how it works. We have a lot of information biologically about humans, you know, interact with this therapy. But we don't have, you know, a lot of other data. We don't have, you know, long-term big studies with humans on it, all that. So knowing that we know how to use it safely and that it has these potential benefits, but we don't have a lot of things in between, are you, dear patient, willing to, you know, step in there and essentially, you know, give this a try? And of course, you never I would do it with somebody who says, no, I don't want to give it a try. That's not the person you're looking for. But there were a lot of people who were just frustrated with where they were at, or they knew there was something that was better, or, you know, they maybe read an article. Remember, this is pre-internet days, if you can imagine that. There was a world before the internet where people actually read paper things and articles and stuff. You know, people— there was a few, a handful of doctors in North America that sent out big newsletters and they did integrative medicine. So people would get those and they come and say, can you do this? And, you know, we'd look and say, yeah, we do that, or I'll look into it, you know. So when these things happen, it's just the natural progression of things that then these people seem to know other people with problems like they have, and you get more people coming in saying, oh, well, we didn't know there was any clinics in town that did this particular type of therapy. Can, you know, can you do that? I, you know, I have MS and I'm on the medicines that my neurologist wants to give me and, you know, control some symptoms, but, you know, I would like to have fill in the blank, better energy, less of this side effect, whatever it is. And generally the answer, you know, to everything would be yes, we can try. We don't know a lot of stuff, but we can try. And so in looking at the idea of continual improvement through failing or, or through things just not going maybe the way that you thought that they ought to go, there was a— I was asked to write a chapter in a book. So you can see kind of in a little A little bright, but a little halo behind my head there. There's 3 different books. Those are the more public versions of books that I've written. A lot of books I've written for doctors that don't get on the list, but in the public versions over here above this side is Outside the Box Cancer Therapies. And that's literally a lot about therapeutics and things you do with cancer that are, you know, not They're not crazy things. They're just things that are a little broader than Western medicine is embracing at the moment. The middle one there, really bright if you're looking at this on the video, is called Cancer: The Journey from Diagnosis to Empowerment. And that's more about the— what do you do with your brain, the mind-body connection when you get a diagnosis of cancer or your loved one gets a diagnosis, and what are the steps you can do to becoming being an empowered patient or an empowered caregiver. And how does that change your— the health equation? It actually does change things. But the blue one over there, if you're watching the video, it's over there on the other side of me, is— it's an anthology book. So every author wrote a different chapter. And the lead author was Jack Canfield. Many people know him. He was a co-author with Chicken Soup for the Soul book series. It was one of the bestselling books ever, of all time. And he wrote a couple of chapters in the book as the anchor chapters, and then they picked people from different professions. So there's a few of us in the healthcare world, there's people from the financial world, there's ex-military people, you know, really interesting eclectic group. But what they were asking for when they asked all of us to write an individual chapter, the The book was, or is, it's still a book, you can still get it. The book's called Success Breakthroughs. And so the idea was supposed to be, well, what is it in your career? So most of the people in the book who were asked to write a chapter had, you know, reached some point in their career where they've had, you know, probably a lot of things not go right, a lot of failure events and a few successes. And they, you know, they managed to build on all of that. So it was mostly people who'd done things for a while. So, you know, the military people tended to be senior ranking or recently retired military folks, or the, you know, professionals tended to be, you know, a little later in their careers. And so my particular chapter, the chapter title actually is called Success Through Failure. So they asked you to to use the word success because that's in the title of the book. And that's a book marketing thing, if you don't know. And so, you know, and that's— there's a lot of people who have spoken on this idea, certainly not new to me. I mentioned, you know, go back to probably people in antiquity talking about this. Certainly, you know, if you look at the Stoics and that sort of group of folks, but probably as long as we've been recording information from humans, they've talked about, well, yeah, You know, things didn't go right and they didn't go right and they didn't go right. And then I came upon an idea that did go right. And I'm famous for the one that did go right. So what the guidance was from the senior editors was, well, can you distill down? Number one, give us your topic. And so mine was, you know, success through failure. And then, you know, number 2 is, can you distill down in a certain amount of words that makes a chapter? Number one, a story about how you came to where you're at and the things that have worked out for you. And then can you boil that down to some points that, you know, that might help other people? And the whole purpose of the book, which you can get on Amazon or any online bookseller, so it's just called Success Breakthroughs. And if you look at Success Breakthroughs, And if you put Jack Canfield and Success Breakthroughs, I think that's the easiest way to have it come up. But anyway, if you're reading it, each person from their own point of view, their own professional background, is telling you a story of how they went from wherever they were that maybe was either a newbie or wasn't working or whatever to things Worked out, or they became well known for a successful event, or whatever it was. And what you find in common with most of the stories is nobody. Well, I won't say nobody, but very few people start with a grand success event. It does happen. It's not terribly common, especially in professional settings where your schooling or your training gives you the tools to do the job and not hurt other people. But really, you learn your profession and your job as you do it. You know, so you start out safe, but not terribly effective sometimes. So in my case, the idea of, you know, success and failure and all of that really is a lot more like, you know, the Winston Churchill idea of, you know, you just, you just keep failing. And it's the people, there's a book that was written called Failing Forward. There's a lot of other books with similar types of titles. So John Maxwell wrote Failing Forward, a really good book. And the idea that most people, especially if they've done it for a long time, have that I think is important to keep in mind because it becomes one of the frustrating things that can play games with your mind is It's not that you are failing, and then you have this grand realization and you become very successful. Literally, if you look at the way that you know Churchill talked about it, or or the Stoics talked about it, or or John Maxwell writes about it, you're literally just you know kind of failing but moving forward. All of the time. Now the idea is you're learning from it. You're not, you know, failing at the same thing every time. You know, that's, that's just called redundancy and not being very wise about stuff. But the idea is not so much that you're going for this destination where all everything is peachy and wonderful, because, you know, that place doesn't exist if you, if you haven't figured that out. But it's that you build on things that didn't go quite right. And eventually there are things that go more right than wrong. And eventually that affects people in one way or another, whether it's you're a professional interacting with other humans or you're, you know, a chef and you, you know, reach a place where you've got, you know, a really big following and people love what you cook, or you are, you know, a scientist and you reach a place where you're, you know, you're now able to synthesize a lot of things and put out information that other scientists can, you know, can use as leaping off points, or, you know, you're some other type of professional where it's, you know, around, you know, the market or whatever. You talk to anybody who's done it a long time in any of those things. And what they'll say is, well, it's not, you know, success and being, you know, at a successful place looks like you're there and looks static to people from the outside looking at you. But in reality, you're still failing just as much as you ever did. You're just doing it through a different lens. And one of the things that bothers people sometimes when they start to have early sort of professional successes is that they have a couple things going on. One is they'll reach a place that they thought was really cool, and it is, and they're helping more people. And then They'll realize that they still have, you know, things not go well or failures or whatever way you want to talk about it. And that will become very disturbing to them because they'll feel like, well, I thought I would kind of arrive and I'd be there and I wouldn't be having failure events anymore. And in reality, that's just— that's an unrealistic expectation to have. So part of moving forward from there is you have 2 choices. One is to reach a place where you've sort of had this plateau and you have success with whatever it is you're doing in your profession, and you stay at that plateau and you organize your life and your interaction with other people so that, that the— you operate at that plateau. That is more comfortable because you can remain relatively successful at that plateau with a lot of people. And that plateau can be wonderful and help a lot of people. But you structure your professional life such that you're not really moving towards the edge of the plateau to take more chances and move forward. Because you're, you know, you're sort of reining it into, this is my, you know, this is my golden area that I do really well, help a lot of people. And I don't really want to push the envelope and learn the hard So that is a very common thing that happens. There's nothing wrong with that. If you reach, you know, if you're a professional of any kind, whether you are a chef or a doctor or an accountant or, you know, whatever it is you do, or you have some other interaction with humans around you, if you reach that place where you can help a lot of people with your real highly specialized knowledge, do it, you know, stick there. But the other option that those people often see is, that's cool. And that might become the core of whatever their business or their practice is, that area they're really pretty good at. But they want to move forward in other areas. There may be a peripheral or an ancillary area to their, what I'm calling their golden area, that isn't, you know, they don't know as much about, but they'd really like to help people because it's related to this area they do really well in. What those folks generally have to do is branch out and start to safely and securely move into the area, but realize they're going to be doing, you know, their failure quotient is going to be a little higher there. So if you think about it, when you hit those plateaus and you're pretty happy with what you're doing, you're going to have this bigger area that's this kind of golden circle where you know a lot and you're maybe an expert in that area and And you attract a lot of that type of, you know, client, patient, whatever, you know, it is you do. And that's going to be very comfortable because you, you know, you've gotten many of the answers there. And then you're going to make yourself uncomfortable and go to this other area that you need, you feel you need to have answers in, but you don't yet. And so you're going to help people in that area. So when it all boils down to it, When I wound around these ideas in my head, and I thought, well, how do I write that into a chapter in a book that, you know, because in anthology books where each author gets a different chapter, you know, it's very easy to skip around and you just go to the people that you might be interested in. And you look and you say, oh, this person's a doctor, I'm not going to read it, read the first few sentences, and if it's no good, then, you know, you move on. So you kind of have to write something that's engaging and, you know, doesn't— you're not the dead weight of the book. So when I look backwards, and this was a number of years ago when I wrote this, one of the most poignant things in my practice that I felt like trained me through the most really uncomfortable, you know, feelings and pain actually was dealing with children with cancer. cancer, which is a really tough, tough area for anybody. And, you know, there are people who do pediatric oncology as a specialty, and it is a rough, rough business because you see children with cancer. And that's, you know, it's— there's no, you know, there's no happy part of, you know, people that deal with cancer on the level of, you know, you're dealing with a very dangerous and deadly disease. But having that be children is, you know, extremely poignant. And so when I thought through the things, and there's certainly, there's a zillion other things I've done not right or, you know, learned from. But when I thought of, well, children with cancer, what was that evolution like? And so I picked just a time period of about 20 years, and I picked sort of a beginning bookend child patient, and then another bookend child patient, and just told their stories and contrasted what I learned over that time. And the purpose of that was that the stories, of course, are real and they're compelling. And, you know, it's a little bit rough and sad to, you know, talk about children with cancer. And just as a side note, when I pitched the idea to the general editor of the book, you know, I was on the phone with them and they said, okay, do you have your idea, you know, for your chapter? And I said, yes, it's— I'm gonna build it around children with cancer. And there was a long pause on the other end of the line. And I thought, oh no, I'm gonna have to not do this. But I said, no, it's, you know, it's a way to talk about my own learning journey. And yes, the 2 children's stories are, you know, very— they tug at your heartstrings and all that, which is very poignant. But really what it is, is, well, what did I do with that information? You know, how did that help move from not doing as well to doing, you know, better with things and being a learner around stuff? So what I wanted to do is just share the 5 things that they apply to that, but they really, I think, apply to everything. And These 5 things, when I kind of deconstructed that learning process, are things that I personally try and do, you know, every day. Obviously not all of us, you know, we don't all do things every day that we're supposed to, but I try and do it more days than I don't. But when I'm thinking about moving into areas that I'm uncomfortable in and I want to learn and I want to grow and I want to move into that area, To me, that's the most important thing I can do because then that allows me, although it's uncomfortable to learn the hard way, and you can make the hard way not quite so hard, the better you get at learning. It's still uncomfortable and putting yourself in uncomfortable situations is uncomfortable by nature, but it's also a way to expand what you can offer the rest of the world. And so the first step that I realized was necessary was persistence. And persistence is one of those things that is— all of these are this way, but it's much like, you know, they talk about something like a muscle. If you train it, you know, it gets stronger and stays stronger. Persistence is that way too. If I go back to— and in the book, in this particular book, I write about the first child cancer patient. And back in those days, we didn't didn't get patients early in their disease. It was always very late in their disease. And so we were largely doing comfort care and trying to help with side effects and quality of life, et cetera. And the young man, you know, did okay for somebody at that late stage of a cancer, but he did pass away. And it was really, it was quite a tragedy because it wasn't our first cancer patient or first person who died, but it was the first child. And, you know, the family were great. And we worked together, you know, to every degree we could to help. The idea of persistence came in the months after that, where I really thought, you know, this is, this is a really rough, rough part of medicine. It's a rough business. And yes, I have all these things that I can offer, but Do I want to, you know, do I want to put myself back in that position with families of children who have cancer and use the things that I have offered to help when we know that there's a certain number of them who, you know, we know are going to pass away? And there's, you know, it's all a big, big thing there. And what I'll say is, is the persistent wasn't like the next day I bounced up and said, yes, you know, I'm persistent and all this. It was an evolutionary process. It, as I think the universe does for you, I didn't get any more pediatric patients for a while. That was probably good. I had a lot of adult cancer patients, and so I had a little bit of time to process. But it came about that really, this was not the time to quit. And the reason was not so much that you save everybody, you know, certainly who has cancer, or in the case of children with cancer, you know, that You, you can save everybody, but you can do things to help. And as long as you're honest with everybody about what that is and what that isn't, it's an okay thing to do. After persistence, though, because without persistence you don't get to the next step, because if you don't persist, you don't move outside of that circle that you have. But after persistence, I thought, well, what was the next thing that kept me going? Well, next thing was being a curious learner. And so, you know, all humans are learners, even if you don't like the idea of learning. We, you know, we pretty much have to have some learning behavior throughout our life, or we would probably die of something sooner than we ought to, or starve to death or something. So there's learning on all different levels, but being a curious learner is the idea that you can take the normal human experience of learning and add curiosity to it. Now, when we go back to this idea of people that hit this plateau where they're pretty successful at something, and they have this kind of golden circle of stuff that they're, you know, pretty much a master of, they do it well, and they learn a lot about that, but it's concentrated learning. That's a really useful tool for anybody who deals with other people or science or whatever it is. Curiosity often though is what takes you either deeper into that area or into other areas that you want to expand the circle and make it bigger. As soon as you expand the circle where you might be an expert here, you expand that circle and that can lead to a lot of uncomfortableness because you expanded into areas that you're familiar with, but you don't know exactly what to do, or you've not really done those things before. Okay. So, for example, I have a lot of friends in the food world and who are chefs and things. And there'll be, you know, just as a random example, there'd be a chef that's, you know, very, very good at, you know, Pan-Asian cuisine. And, you know, they have the skills to do everything else. But, you know, they're a Pan-Asian chef and they go and, you know, They, they maybe move to a different setting where that's their core, but now suddenly they have to start doing a lot of desserts and things that are, you know, different. And they certainly have the technical skills to do it, not harm you with their food, but they've never been, you know, desserts just aren't something they burned in and wore in. So they're actually in a learning phase. Same thing with medicine or any other, you know, being a lawyer or anything. So curious learning is the way to say, to honestly assess, look, okay, in the last 5 years, I've learned these things. I'm a lot better at this now. But what is it that I'm not better at? Or what is it that's being presented to me now that is frustrating to me, that I'm not getting answers with, that I'm not, you know, helping people as much? And I guarantee you that when you do that and you give a logical, honest assessment, It will be things where you maybe want to help more, do more, do different things. The uncomfortable part is that you don't know enough about that to be as expert as you are there, as you are in your sort of golden circle area. And so the idea of being a curious learner is to be open, but also honest with yourself. Because if you go to your plateau and you say, I'm just going to stay here, and you say, well, what don't I know? And you look at your plateau area where you've got this golden circle of a lot of information, you say, well, there's almost nothing I don't know, right? It's pushing the boundaries outward where, where your curiosity has to come in and your honesty is saying, I'm— I really want to go in this area and help people here do this thing. But I don't really have, you know, I have the skills to do it safely, but that's about it. There's a lot to learn. Well, if you don't ever move into the places where there's a lot to learn, which is your choice, you're not really going to advance further. If you stay in that golden circle, there may be millions of things you can do to learn in that area, but that probably will push you into areas that you don't know everything about. So there's a couple of ways to go about it. The next one that I put down because I think it was critical. So once you go past persistence and being a curious learner, the next part, especially when you're working with, you know, other humans, is what I called informed boldness. So what in the world does that mean? Well, informed boldness is the idea that You have to be bold enough to move into this other area that makes you uncomfortable and that makes you want to learn more and ply your trade in a broader area and help more people. So you got to want to go there. So that's a bold step. Stepping out of our comfort zone takes boldness. But the other part of it is you don't want to do it in a way that is uninformed. And so the idea of informed boldness is that you are going to go into this area of unknown or less known, knowing as much as you can about it. Where are the guardrails? What is safe for me to do in this area being relatively new in it? And what is not safe for me to do in this area? What new knowledge do I have to gain and, and, you know, put into my world so that I can do this? And I can do it better and better each time. And what generally happens, especially if you're getting feedback from, you know, the work you're doing gives you feedback, such as, you know, maybe a more mechanical type thing or a scientific endeavor or something, or the people you're working with give you feedback and saying, that worked pretty good, or that didn't work very well, or, you know, I got better, I got worse, whatever it is. The feedback will teach you the rest of it. But the informed boldness part is you have to be bold enough to take the step out of your comfort zone, but also smart enough to inform yourself about where are you stepping? What is safe to do there? What is not safe? And those are the guardrails. And then within that is what's safe for a newbie to do. And then where are the areas I wanna gain knowledge so that in the next steps I can apply that trade and learn and learn and learn. And then what you find is after a while, that becomes an area you have quite a bit of mastery over. But informed boldness is taking the step, but taking it with some forethought into where are the guardrails I need to start with, what are my dos and don'ts, and then where can I grow from there? Now the next step is, because again these things all build, if you don't have persistence you don't go any further, if you don't have a curious learner's attitude you don't want to go any further, and if you don't have informed boldness you'll either be uninformed and bold and make mistakes that hurt people or you won't have the boldness to go into the new area. But the next one then is after you've picked your guardrails in the new area and you're bold enough to step into Um, the concept that you, you are never, and that, that sounds like a real positive one, doesn't it? So when you go and you take the leap into the new area, you suddenly, and this happens every time you do this, you have this realization that, that you, you know, you are never, and the you are nevers are things like you're never done learning. Yeah. Learning. You're never done trying. You're certainly not done failing. You're never in possession of all the facts. We never are anyway. But, you know, if you stay in your kind of golden circle where you're super expert, you can feel like you know most of the facts, and you probably do, you know, unless they discover new facts. But when you branch out and you get into these other areas and you pick where your guardrails for safety are, You can feel pretty alone in there and pretty much like, geez, I'm gonna have to, you know, do things at a really low rudimentary level to learn and work my way up. Now, the skills you built before will make your learning curve faster, but there's still a learning curve at the new place. So the biggest thing about the you are never realization is not so much it's negative, but that it's this empowering place to be as a learning human, where you know that you're going to move into this new area. You're going to do it safely but boldly moving forward. And it's okay. It's okay to start over in that area. You're never really totally starting over because we carry all of our experiences, negative and positive, with us forward. But this one's going to feel clunky for a while because it's not your thing, or it's related to your thing, but it's not the expertise area that you've had for so long. And the part about that is, is that you can repeat this as many times as you want to. For some people, especially in hyper-specialized areas of professions or any other, you know, endeavor, You know, whether you're a scientist and you're very specialized in a certain area, or, you know, you're an accountant and you do very specific types of accounting, or you're a doctor and you specialize in whatever, or, you know, you're a chef and you specialize in whatever. Those are just natural, natural things. But there are still things to learn. And so once you realize that you, you know, you can just keep broadening your circle of knowledge and then influence and help you can give other people. That's huge. And you realize that you're never really done and you have to, every time you broaden out, you have to be boldly informed and pick your guardrails. And you have to be ready to know that you're never fully informed and you're gonna have to start at the bottom and work up in that area till you gain mastery. And as I said, we learn from our past and we get more mastery that way. That just keeps going on and on. Now, at some point, you know, depending on how, how curious you are, that circle may just keep growing. But the last part, I think, that was probably the, you know, the ultimate goal, and should, for, you know, if this is the direction you like to take things, should be the goal that, that we all have, is you go through all of this and you're hopefully helping other humans as you do it, whatever your profession or endeavor is. In my case, it's medicine. But then at a certain point, the goal then takes on a new umbrella or a new focus, and that is passing it on. Because at least what I always thought was, why would I go through all this trouble to learn all these things and make mistakes and, you know, learn the hard way over and over and over again. And then, you know, just keep all that information inside of me. The idea with most, you know, professionals through time has been that when you reach a place where you've skinned your knuckles and you've done things the hard way, and then you found the better ways to do them, you want to pass that on and bring it full circle and share it with other Because just like I was saying, you know, those of us who are doing some of this stuff 20 or 30 years ago were working with things that people had done, you know, 40 or 50 or 60 years ago. We were standing on their shoulders. And, you know, 50 years later, it seems like, well, that was fairly rudimentary knowledge. But without that knowledge, we'd have been starting with zero, right? So each step That goes forward, you know, whether it's an area of science where you're doing very specific experimentation, or it's an area of medicine where you're dealing with the human condition and technology changing and everything, or, you know, or it's whatever you do. Every step can be a big step forward. And the important part is it certainly is passing it on, helping and sharing helps others in your professional circle doing what you do. That's number one. But number two, generally the point of whatever your job is at some, maybe directly or maybe indirectly, is to help humanity and help other people. And if those of us who go through and keep moving forward and keep amassing knowledge and become specialized either in smaller or broader areas of whatever our endeavor is, ideas, don't come full circle and then give that information back to the, to the profession or the industry that we're in or whatever. We're, we're not going to be here forever. We're all going to die. And we don't want to go to our graves with the good stuff still in us, because that shortcuts the new people from having to make all our mistakes. And then they can learn new stuff. And 20 or 30 or 40 years from now, they'll be sharing things. that literally leaped off of your shoulders back in the day. Well, this has been Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. I'm thankful that I got to talk to you today about this. And if you are interested in the anthology, this is a lot of different authors. Success Breakthrough is a book with Jack Canfield and a bunch of other people who are, you know, more, let's say, mature in their professional Status about you know how they sort of broke through or failed and failed till they did something really great. You can find that on Amazon or anywhere else. The new book, Cancer: The Journey from Diagnosis to Empowerment, is just out four weeks now. It's doing really well. You can check that on any online area. Journey from Diagnosis to Empowerment, the new cancer. Are both by me. And I will also be back on the radio or on whatever viewing platform you have in a week from now. But I'm Dr. Paul Anderson for Medicine Health with Dr. Paul, and I'll say goodbye for today.