Live For Yourself, Not For Others... Carm Huntress

I'm hoping maybe could help others out there is that as soon as you get to a place, Mike, where you're giving, you know, through trauma or through whatever's happened to you in your life, as soon as you start doing, or maybe I should say it this way, as soon as you start showing up in the world and trying to achieve or trying to accomplish for other people's reasons or for other reasons, and especially for other people in your life, and it could be as simple as, you know, your mother or father saying you should be a doctor. Right? As soon as you do that, you're giving up your innate gifts and purpose to others. And I think the place I am now is I will never do that again. Why on earth would I give those gifts up to anybody else? They're mine, and I've curated them, and I've been through the suffering and the loss and the journey, and all those things make me me. And you're sitting here telling me I should give those up? To get the approvals of others? No way. I want to show up and give to the world in the best way I can. And I'm so, you know, I now get to be in this place with Credo, right? Through this healing, through this work where I get to build what I really believe in and want to believe, not what I think my investors want, not what I think, you know, LinkedIn wants or my family wants or my partner wants, you know, for me. And I get to create from that place. And so, That's the big takeaway, I think, is just don't give your gifts up to anybody else. Realize that you're, you know, they're yours and this is your opportunity always every day to share those gifts with the world.

And what was the final turning point? What was the final piece?

I mean, I would say that the piece that stands out for me is, you know, I had to ask myself this question at some point is how do I let the fire burn within without the desire to win. I had to ask that really deep fundamental question of like, wait a second, if I give up on this people-pleasing thing, if I give up on these outcomes, what's my fire? How does it burn? How could it burn? There's nothing to burn. It's this sort of empty thing because all I know how to do is build the fire from a place of wanting to win more than anything else and prove to the world that I'm enough. And, you know, I think that for me, was sort of the final thing I had to resolve. And I am now in the place where I am so clear, like I've never been before, that I don't have to be attached to those outcomes anymore. I get to just be in this place of creation and purpose for me and my gifts. And that's the thing that I, you know, think about now every day and get to share with the world. And it's so much— it's such a big open place when you're in this mindset. And I, I encourage others to pursue it, right? Which is, you know, find your values, find your boundaries, find your faith, and live from that place every day and curate from there, right? And when you do that, you can get to this place after peeling back a lot where you start to let go of the outcome. You know, if you think about— I think, Mike, one way to look at this is like, if you think about any great artist or great musician Do you think they at all were interested in the outcome? Like if you see them on stage, if you think about your favorite artist playing, I don't think you'd sit there and say, boy, that person was really into the outcome. They were trying to make that crowd real happy. I mean, you'd just say no way. You would say, man, they are creating from a place of sharing their gifts with the world.

Pure joy.

Pure joy, right? Unattached to anything and just like, here it is, I'm in this state of flow and I'm giving fully.

Well, they're not playing music, they become the music.

Yeah. It just is. And they're not in the knowing of it and, oh, I'm playing this chord and now I'm going to go to this chord and that chord, right? They are feeling and just expressing themselves in the purest way. And I think we deeply admire that, but we deeply don't understand where it comes from. And so many people in society today aren't pursuing that, right? We've lost that in so many ways. We're kind of obsessed with, you know, out, you know, especially financial success. And I think a lot of people are really unhappy out there. I mean, I think a lot of people are really in this state of, hey, I did all the things, right? I checked all the boxes. I did the career that my parents told me to do. I started the company, you know, for like me, like where to prove to the world that I'm capable and I can do this. And, you know, I get all this fame or, you know, I'm going to work 100-hour weeks and be miserable, but I'm going to make a ton of money, right? None of those things really relate back to what you and I are talking about, which is really showing up in this pure place and wanting to share your gifts with the world and be unattached to the outcome of whatever that is.

So what is it like to inhabit that place now, given where you've been, building from the darkness? Deeply suffering, giving everything, and still being asked to leave, told you're no longer needed here. Help me understand the contrast. Like, what does it feel like now to do what you're doing?

Well, I think what ends up happening is you end up in this very creative place, honestly, because, you know, if you think about like a people pleaser, Mike, you end up in this place where you're always kind of caveating yourself and catching yourself and sort of ruminating on, oh wait, what's this person gonna think? And what's gonna be the outcome here? What will my investors think? Or how will people perceive this? And the joy I get to have every day now is going into work and working with my team and sharing with them my vision of what I want in the world. And I think, you know, at Credo, we're really working on this thing where we want every doctor to have a copilot next to them to help them better care and take care of patients. And I think we're in this moment of time where AI is clearly showing that it can better take care of patients than really doctors can. And, you know, every single study I see is that we're on that trajectory or even past that trajectory of where AI will be better at diagnosing and treating patients. We still deem doctors to be guides, but, you know, we've asked doctors for, you know, the beginning of time to kind of be like gods, right? They have to know, you know, every piece of medical knowledge, and, you know, they have to just know everything to kind of treat a patient, you know, well. And if you think about, like, our world, you know, we get about 1,000 pages of medical history on every patient we touch today. There's no way a human can even hold that in their head, right? That's like an impossibility. If I like, hey, memorize 1,000 pages of something—

and that's for one patient—

that's one patient. And so, you know, it's, it's this untenable thing. And, and I think the thing that, you know, I would say that's so different for me is that my determination in that I believe we're in this moment of AI where we can move from sick care to healthcare. And everybody knows how broken healthcare is and the whole system and going through it. And you know what I would say, Mike, is that, you know, and I've, as you know, I've had some health challenges lately and they've been difficult and I've had to go live in the system of healthcare. And it's made me really realize how broken it is. And when I started Credo, actually, I sort of write a whole thing of, of in 1995 when my mom was going through her cancer treatment, she would actually sit at night and type up— we had a typewriter— and she would, you know, go see second opinions. She went to a lot of different, different hospitals across the country. And she would sit there and, and I could never forget remembering listening to her type at night. And, you know, I'm sitting there, she has this cancer diagnosis and she's typing up her medical records for her doctors to to like give them a summary. And, you know, she put a picture of her with my brother and sister and I on the front of her records. And, you know, she'd go into the appointment and say, here's everything about me. And I would say like for most patients that hasn't changed. And that was 1995. And it's kind of like that was a big impetus for me to start Credo. And I think that, you know, I've gone now to this place You know, with what's happened recently with my health and, and, you know, facing that head on, I've come to this realization that I want to build this for me. And, you know, yes, what my mom went through was really hard, and I want to honor her memory always. But when you have to live through it yourself and you see how broken the system is and how much we need to change it and make it better, I know now that this is my opportunity to do it for me and not for anybody else, not even my mom. And to come from that place, I have never felt so empowered and so happy to be able to show up in the world in this way and share my gifts in this way and know that we can make an incredible impact and really just change healthcare for the better. And like I said, move from a system of of sick care to true healthcare, where we have AI supporting doctors in every decision and really healing people. And I just, I don't even think we talk about it anymore. You know, what the true job of a doctor is to do is to heal people. And I think we're on that precipice with what's happening with technology right now. And that's what I'm so determined to bring to the world. And what I found is that I'm enough.