“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
On my first day of school, I peed my pants.
Not because I was afraid of life without my mom’s aloo parathas for lunch, or the punishment I would face for splattering crimson-colored paint all over my Mickey Mouse shirt; I peed my pants out of excitement for finally becoming a student.
Decades later, only the classrooms have changed. The learning never stops.
The operating room is my favorite playground, the human body my most challenging puzzle, and my patients a humbling reminder: people won’t ever care how much you know, until they know how much you care.
I want to shatter the structured conventions of medical training and create life-saving devices. I want to take the “wrong” path to achieve my dreams of becoming a surgeon-entrepreneur. I want never to be the stale adult but forever a feisty, fearless child on the edge of peeing his pants.
There is no greater profession in the world than to be a student. Ask the difficult questions, learn the hard lessons, and be humbled. Again. And again. And again.
Because the best mistakes we make are the ones we learn from.
— Anmol Gupta