Luck is Where Opportunity Meets Preparation

With success comes a degree of scrutiny and observation, some of that will be positive and some negative, on more than one occasion my success was a result of luck, or literally being the proverbial right person in the right place at the right time.

I had just returned from my therapeutic endoscopy fellowship in the department of surgery at the University of Hamburg in Hamburg Germany. It was interesting to me was that not only was it an opportunity to master new advanced techniques that very few people in the world could perform, but with it came the responsibility of being able to teach those same techniques to others in my own country. I had been preoccupied by this thought while away and had often mused that it would be incredible to be able to have a simulator-type product for these highly specialized endoscopic procedures, that would teach both the manual and the cognitive skills separately and then unite them together in a simulator format. In fact, in this way it would be possible to actually program in the procedural style and methods of any of the worlds’ most accomplished surgeons for anyone to learn without having to travel or spend extensive amounts of time in on-site training. 

These concepts stemmed from an early childhood experience where a friend of the Family and accomplished science fiction author Isaac Asimov came to know my early thirst for knowledge, created a short story just for me as a young child. It was in that short story a young student was sent to school to study in the traditional way while his friends were instead taught skills on simulators. The young man quickly realized that the knowledge and skills obtained by working on simulators ended up being a limitation to his friends who did not have the most recent models or software. When the protagonist in the story questioned why he was learning in a more traditional way, he was informed that he was selected to be one of those who would teach beyond what a simulator could provide.

Shortly after my return from Germany, I was introduced to a remarkable innovator whose name was David Hon who had created a company called Ixion. Somehow, David had learned of my skill as well as my encounter with our family’s friend. In what was an amazing stroke of luck, he invited me to join him in developing simulators for medicine that would teach upper endoscopy, colonoscopy, and the more advanced skills of ERCP including selective cannulation of both the bile duct and pancreatic duct as well as sphincterotomy and stent placement, and ultimately laparoscopic surgery. It was at that moment I realized that forces that have been set in motion when I was a young child had come together at that moment in time and that it was my preordained destiny. It was only up to me to seize the moment.

Thus began an exciting journey that led to an intense period of learning during which I could use my learned engineering skills combined with new skills of software development and hardware integration to develop the simulators. At the time we were writing programming using artificial intelligence before the existence of artificial intelligence was recognized. If you will, imagine having to program and coordinate live images that would match with manual maneuvers of an endoscope for every millimeter of possible direction during a procedure. 

Even more interesting was to witness the birth of a new field known as medical simulation and to play a prominent role in its creation. True to the protagonist in the science fiction story, I witnessed the creation of simulators that would teach the maneuvers of various experts in the field. However, I also recognized the limitations and began deconstructing the process and publishing concepts like “visual feel” and the importance of mastering manual skills apart from visual skills, and then bringing them together that resulted in even greater learning capabilities. In this manner it was possible to take the teaching skills and combine them with the device building skill to not only shorten the learning curve, but potentially prevent complications and even death…. as physicians would learn on simulators instead of new patients as part of their training process. 

Since that time, there is not a month that does not go by when I am not approached by a physician, either young or older, who trained on one of the simulators I helped to develop or was influenced by the textbook chapters or other publications that came out of our simulation work.

Now, I am a firm believer in both destiny and that you make your own luck in life and it’s my contention that if you are prepared when an opportunity arises then you are well placed to exploit it. My thirst for knowledge and my desire for continuous improvement is at the heart of my personality and this leaves me fully prepared as well as minded to grasp any opportunity.