Playing the Long Game
This week I found myself traveling from coast to coast, across the Atlantic and back. I don’t normally travel this much, especially for work, but when it rains it pours. My first destination; a conference for community volunteers and leaders in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease and all other dementia’s, my second stop; a week-long kickoff to a highly technical partnership with a 3rd party in Europe to complement my next Robotic Assisted Surgery product development project.
It’s not uncommon for me to swing wildly between drastically disparate efforts in my life like this. At one moment it’s a shift from Alzheimer’s Advocacy to Robotics, at another moment, it’s from renovating a bathroom to changing diapers. However, I often can’t help but find common threads and themes running between these distinct aspects of my life. Pro-tip for DIY enthusiasts and diaper changing novices alike, keep track of and dispose of waste properly, otherwise it has a tendency to spread out and get all over—I know from experience.
Alzheimer’s Journey
Alzheimer’s is a form of dementia that robs people of their memories and eventually their selves. I learned this first hand when over the course of my grandmother’s journey with it. She had a whipcrack whit, usually delivered with impeccable timing and a sardonic smile. She was a woman ahead of her time, although when I was still in high school at the time of her passing I didn’t appreciate what it meant that she had a full career as a pharmacist while still being a wife and mother to four.
I lived most of my life in distant places from my grandmother. When we finally moved within an hour of her, the chance for my fondness and familiarity to grow into a closeness was prevented by the fact that she soon didn’t recognize me as her grandson. Before long, she didn’t recognize my mother as her own daughter. Not fully understanding the situation resulted in my shying away from visits to my lasting regret.
Fast forward ten years and I found myself in the bay area, and acquainted with the woman who would become my wife. She reintroduced me to Alzheimer’s but from a unique, more hopeful perspective. This time as an advocate for awareness, research, and programs to support patients and their caregivers. Due to both our personal connections with the disease, we have been supporting the cause in various ways for close to a decade now.
Engaging in the cause you hear bold claims about “finding a cure” or “beating the disease” or hoping for the “first survivor”. The statements are meant to motivational and inspirational, and they often are. But in the face of decades of research without seemingly tangible results, these same same words can fall on cynical ears and can be robbed of their meaning and sincerity. That was until just a few years ago.
Within the last three years, something incredible happened. Three separate treatments to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s were approved for use by the FDA. Two are still on the market. Speakers at the leadership conference told the story of how every advocates effort, every volunteer’s hour, and every donor’s dollar set of a chain of events that led to the breakthrough treatments that for the first time in history give those with Alzheimer’s some hope.
The Next Step in Robotic Assisted Surgery
I’ve been in my career for a decade now and I just started my second major professional project. The first was the development and launch of the Da Vinci 5 Surgical System. I spent eight years dedicated to that effort—one that spanned my marriage, the birth of my three sons, and a global pandemic.
Designing and developing a robotic system with three free-standing units, thousands of custom parts, where it's functionality at any time can mean the difference between the life and death of a patient takes dedication, persistence, care, and precision.
Over the years spent developing a new surgical robotic platform I can't count the number of engineering activities that make up a product so complex; design reviews held, brainstorms conducted, requirements refined, test cases written and executed, variance requests filled out, reports written, change orders submitted, signatures chased, CAD models created, drawings drafted, meetings held, rework conducted prototypes produced, processes debated, schedules created, plans laid, new plans made to replace the old plans when they didn't pan out, ideas proposed, risks mitigated, and on and on. I'm many ways, it was precisely the fact that you could count the completion and passing of these seeming mundanities that kept me going. Even when I was still years away from the final goal, I could see progress by some measure.
The reality is that what I worked on was not merely the result of the efforts of the hundreds of engineers working with me. It was built on the foundation of decades of prior work. Our ideas and designs could not have ever existed in a vacuum.
The result has been the Da Vinci 5 system, enthusiastically received by surgeons, their OR teams, and even the hospitals that pay for it. While its impact will be measured over years, it has already been shown to reduce procedure times and minimize trauma to patient tissue which only serves to improve patients outcomes. It has been humbling to see something making a real difference in people's lives and know that I had some small role in helping it materialize into the real world.
Different and Yet, The Same
Perhaps you are asking yourself why I share these two drastically different anecdotes. To me, they signal the importance of persistence and sustained effort. We live in a time of instant gratification where almost every need can be accessed at our fingertips. That convenience easily distort the reality which is that virtually every endeavor worth undertaking in life—especially the ones that will determine the collective fate of humanity—progress at a glacial pace but still require our concentration and concerted effort over years and sometimes decades.
On an individual level our education, our careers, our families, relationships with friends or partners, our health, our hobbies are all things that take a lifetime to develop. You can’t sprint for a month, start a company and have a successful business overnight. You can’t date someone for a year only to stop putting in effort and expect that relationship to last. You can’t land a great job straight out of college and expect to be the top of your industry without putting in the effort and gaining all the battle scars along the way.
At societal level, it’s the same. We can’t expect to improve our ability to treat intractable diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s or, the next pandemic if society isn’t actively searching for a cure on a daily basis. We can’t expect to last on this Earth with a perpetually growing population without deliberately developing ways to harness renewable energy sources. We can’t expect to provide food and clean water to every person on the planet without finding ways to eradicate poverty and bring all mankind up to an acceptable standard of living.
You are the Long Game
If you haven’t realized it yet, you are the long game. You are the sustained effort most worth investing in. You get to decide whether that means
Career
Set the long term vision, write down the most impactful action you could take today, do it.
Set consistent times with mentors and be up front about what you want to learn and what you hope they will share
Schedule your own time to develop skills that will increase your value.
Personal
Give space for yourself to work on yourself and make that part of your daily routine
Compare yourself to where you were a year ago, not yesterday or last week. It takes time to see the progress.
Unplug from time to time and let yourself reset
Patience First, Always
My current employer, a medical robotics company, has the guiding slogan Patients First, Always. I’ve always liked this phrase for how simple it is, and yet how well it can guide the actions of such a large organization. When thinking of your efforts in developing yourself over a lifetime, one guiding principle you can aspire to is Patience First, Always. Be patient and forgiving with yourself. You will have misteps along the path. Sometimes, you may even forget where you are going. But don’t give up, make the course correction and keep moving forward.
