This Is How My Father Got to Be a Brain Surgeon

I come from a family of overachievers. My oldest brother is a Professor of Cardiology with an MD and an MPH from Harvard. My second oldest brother is an Assistant District Attorney who graduated from Brown, after which he got his JD. My sister graduated from Mount Holyoke and earned a JD and a master’s degree in taxation before working in the International Tax Division of the IRS. Even my mother had a doctorate, a Ph.D. in comparative literature. By comparison, I am the family underachiever. Two Master’s Degrees, even an MBA from Chicago, do not equal a Doctorate, at least not in my family. I was pre-med but rejected the idea at the age of 20 and have regretted doing so ever since, but that’s another story.

As remarkable as all those academic degrees are, they pale compared to what my father achieved. He graduated at 16 from the University of Minnesota, where he was Phi Beta Kappa. He earned his MD at age 20 and was an Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society member. He became board certified in General Surgery and Neurosurgery and had a distinguished medical career at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where he served on the staff for more than 60 years (it helps to start early). He was also Chief of Neurosurgery at the Boston City Hospital and an Associate Clinical Professor at Harvard Medical School. 

Medicine was his second career. As a child, he was a musical prodigy who nearly decided to become a concert pianist.

Maybe it’s because no one is a celebrity in their own family, to me, Dad seemed normal. When he wasn’t at work, I usually saw him lying in bed with the TV on in the background while he read a paperback novel by Louis L’Amour, Earl Stanley Gardner, or Elmore Leonard, among many other books. He sometimes read two or three books daily and amassed a collection of probably 20,000+ volumes. The collection would have been greater, except my mother forced him to give away old books whenever he bought new ones because all the shelves were full. Every Saturday morning, he and I went to the Brattle Book Shop in Cambridge, where he picked up another shopping bag or two full of paperbacks. Besides reading, his hobbies were music, watching sports, and news. He played the piano for 15 minutes daily, watched every Boston sports game on TV, read the Boston Herald and the Wall Street Journal (never the Boston Globe), and sat through an hour or more of the evening news. Not exactly Einstein, right?

And yet, in medicine, my father was at or near the top of a notoriously difficult profession. Not only that, but he also became one of the world’s leading authorities in neurosurgery and neurology and co-authored hundreds of medical journal articles. He was a pioneer in understanding how brain abnormalities can cause violent human behavior, and he was an early proponent of both CT and MRI scanning technology.

He must have been, as they say in Boston, “wicked smart,” and he was. And yet, when I was in college and asked him for help with Chemistry problems, he had no idea how to solve them. Similarly, his knowledge of Calculus was rudimentary at best. Given enough time, he would probably have muscled his way through, but there was no blinding insight or flashes of brilliant analysis. 

How on earth, I wondered, did someone who could barely explain math and science problems to his teenage son ever become a world-famous neurosurgeon? It’s a question I wrestled with for quite a long time, especially as I sought to understand why some of my classmates were doing much better than I was and why schoolwork was such a grind. Maybe I just got unlucky and didn’t inherit the ‘genius’ gene?

Several excellent books have looked at the issue of intelligence and achievement, and most have concluded that there are no born geniuses, just people who are obsessed with certain things from an early age and who spend a huge amount of time doing what other people would call work but which they call fun. 

If you are interested in the subject, I highly recommend Geoff Colvin’s “Talent Is Overrated,” which dives into the lives of people like Mozart, Einstein, and Bill Gates, among many others. Colvin concludes that certain people spend enormous amounts of time developing skills but are, in fact, otherwise normal. 

Conspicuously absent from Colvin’s analysis is an explanation of Nicola Tesla, who, by all accounts, appears to be that rare genius with no precedent who is almost entirely self-taught and whose abilities cannot be explained by deliberate practice. Nevertheless, Colvin is probably 99.9% correct. In virtually all cases of people we would label “genius” based on their achievements, including my father, hard work at an early age and continued hard work over subsequent decades probably explains most of their success.

When I asked my father how he managed to get through college at 16 and medical school at 20, he would say casually that he studied hard, did well, and moved up. That explanation was, to me, useless. If I wanted to pattern my life after my father’s, it sounded like I should just go to class, do my homework, and I would end up being at the top of my field also. It doesn’t work that way.

I never got a straight answer from him, but I eventually figured out how Dad achieved what he did. It started with obsessive and single-minded parents who instilled in him a serious work ethic.

My dad was an only child, and his parents doted on him. His father was a general practitioner in Minnesota who developed a midwestern work ethic, and his mom was a stay-at-home mom who poured all her attention into her only son. They loved music and bought their one-year-old a new baby grand Mason & Hamlin piano, an instrument my father kept throughout his life and had restored twice. By his account, his parents made him practice at least five or six hours daily from the age of four or five. It wasn’t long before he started getting good.

When he wasn’t playing the piano, Dad was reading. The more he read, the faster he read, and the more he liked reading. He used to say that he never focused on reading every word but that instead, as his eyes moved down the page, his brain formed pictures. He read so much and was so good at it that it was like watching a movie. Reading wasn’t a chore; it was a relaxing escape and a completely immersive experience for him.

Therein lies the secret. 

Dad loved to read. He read a lot and widely and, therefore, never found schoolwork difficult. From an early age, he built up the capacity to absorb huge amounts of information in a short amount of time. To his friends and peers, he must have been the ‘class genius,’ and he was. But he didn’t have some innate gift for learning or superhuman power. His love of reading gave him an edge in learning new information that compounded over time. The more he learned, the more connections he had between bits of data, which made it easier for him to retain ever more information – a virtuous cycle. 

Some kids find reading a chore and therefore do it less. That was certainly true in my case. Sadly, unlike my dad, I had no patience to sit at a piano for long periods or read for hours. I kept up in school and did well overall, but I was never at the top of any class. It wasn’t until I was well into my 30s that I started to make reading a priority. 

If I could go back and change one thing about my childhood, it would be to make my younger self spend several hours a day reading. And if I were to give one piece of advice to anyone who wants to get ahead, no matter what stage of life you may be in, it would be to prioritize reading every day.

Both Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are known for their voracious reading habits. Warren Buffett has been quoted saying he spends about 80% of his day reading, and in his early years, he could read up to 600-1,000 pages a day. If you consider an 8-hour working day, this translates to around 6 to 7 hours. However, Buffett often works more than 8 hours, so his reading time could be longer.

Charlie Munger, too, is an avid reader, although there isn't a precise number of hours he spends reading each day. He emphasizes the importance of a wide reading habit, famously saying, "In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time – none, zero."

So, you want to be a brain surgeon, right, or maybe just world-class in some other area? If you’re fully committed, let me give you a road map. First, start early and be laser-focused on achieving your goal. It helps to have parents or coaches who will keep you on task. Second, read a lot and widely. It doesn’t matter if you’re reading great literature or pulp fiction. What matters is that you are using your brain to develop deep connections and new synapses that allow you to retain knowledge faster and longer than most others. If you spend eight hours a day reading, that would be a great use of time.

Wait, did I just say eight hours? That’s insane, right? 

If you want to be world-class, or even extremely good, at anything, you need to spend a crazy amount of time doing that thing, whether it’s music, art, math, science, or video production. 

A couple of years ago, my daughter persuaded me to join the Duolingo family account, and I decided it was finally time for me to learn Spanish. I have spent approximately 15 minutes daily doing Duolingo Spanish for the past two years. It's fun, but how close am I to being fluent? On a scale of one to ten, I’m still at one. Why? Because I haven’t invested enough time.

According to most estimates, it takes at least 800 hours of diligent effort to be conversant in a foreign language, although achieving fluency may be double or triple that. At my current rate of 15 minutes per day, that equals one hour of study time per four days. To reach 800 hours will take me 3,200 days, which is approximately nine years. A highly motivated person would spend 3 hours daily, which is 12x my paltry 15 minutes. At that rate, proficiency can be had in as little as nine months.

A recent blog post by the economist Bryan Caplan spells it out clearly: “Do Ten Times as Much: Unpleasant advice that works.” I highly recommend you read it if you want to excel at anything. 

Over time, we all tend to forget how much time we spent accomplishing hard tasks, which I’m sure was true for my dad. It’s safe to say that he put in 10x more effort than his peers in high school and college. 

So, do you still want to be a brain surgeon? Start early and work like hell. 

Sorry, there are no shortcuts.