1. There will be some time in your career, that you become tired of the doors of opportunity closing on you and will need to “Kick the door down”!!!!!

2) I can honestly state that I am overweight and need to lose ten pounds, but I self-identify as skinny.

3) I am at a point in my life that I find myself continuously asking, “Which battles of my associates do I want to fight today? Which of their demons do I want to avoid engaging?”

4) There are a lot of very talented people out there who will never reach their level of success because their inner demons or external demons constantly prey on their success.

5) You are in trouble if you give me the “silent treatment,” and I enjoy it.

6) Outside of the hospital, I am not the guy who feels a need to validate my adulthood by fixing everything. I am ok with that. Now, get help, own, and fix your own dysfunctions.

7) My life’s work outside of the hospital is not to validate you, I will listen to you, support you, and love you, deal with your own shit, or let that shit go!!

8) We continuously run from our inner demons, never understanding that our inner demons are ever present, lurk in the shadows, and find unfortunate, untimely, and painful ways to confront us.

9) Living your life to fit into a tribe is overrated.

10) Most of the unfinished business in your life can always be found in a cemetery.

11) There is no shortage of people who want to take credit for your great work, and a far greater number of people who want to discredit your work.

12) Arrogance and self-awareness rarely go together.

13) There have been times in my career when I had to take action and “let me show these fuckers what they are missing”.

14) The work of a heart specialist doesn’t change you, it makes you more of who you are.

15) with a college education, I learned how to learn and realized I knew little, with life experiences, I learned how to apply what I learned and gained wisdom.

16) I have traveled over 1.5 million miles, the world has become small to me.

17) I can function and work well because I apparently have a very high tolerance for ambiguity.

18) We all have our battles, one with the person sitting across from you, the second is the person inside of you. Once you conquer the one inside of you, the one across from you really doesn’t matter.

19) I have had many times in my life and career when I had to work harder than an ugly stripper.

(20) Working and operating on the heart has a very, very small margin of error.

(21) I have never heard someone wake up one morning and say, Working on the heart looks like fun, I think I will make a living working in conditions where a patient is at continuous risk of imminent death

22) Failure does not make you a loser; it makes you human.

23) Denial and fear are humans’ greatest inner demons.

24) In life, we perseverate on the negative things, despite wanting to relive the positive things.