Everyone Told Me Not to Become a Heart Surgeon. I Did It Anyway.

By Toby Cosgrove, MD

People often keep silent when they think you’re making a mistake. But not in my case. Time and again, I kept hearing the same thing: “Don’t do it.” Teachers, advisors, authority figures. They told me straight out. “No.” “Bad idea.” “Go back and think about this.” Maybe I was a little crazy to think I could do it, but I was also determined.

It was the late 1960s. I’d finished medical school, and I was planning to go into cardiac surgery. Everybody tried to talk me out of it. Looking back, I can understand why. It had been less than 20 years since the development of cardio-pulmonary bypass made it possible for surgeons to perform complex open heart procedures. Cardiac surgery was a rigorous and fast-moving discipline. The work would be hard, the hours would be long, and the learning curve was steeper than Mount Washington.

And I had a few things going against me. For one, there was my academic record. I’d worked hard as an undergraduate, but long days and nights in the library produced little more than a collection of Cs. Twelve of 13 medical schools rejected me. I was the least talented person in my residency. That’s why people told me that it would be a mistake for me to go into cardiac surgery.

Dogged persistence

There is a motto (from an advertisement, I’ve since learned) that I keep on my desk. It says, “What can be conceived can be created.” It tells me that if I can imagine something, I could make it a reality. Deep inside I knew I could become a cardiac surgeon, and a good one. So I gathered every ounce of persistence I had, and after much resistance, found a training program that would accept me.

Today, many years and more than 22,000 cardiac surgeries later, I know it was the right decision. That opinion has been reinforced by grateful patients, and by Cleveland Clinic, where I served as chairman of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery for 15 years, and am now president and CEO.

My aha moment

But what explains my average academic record and difficult years in medical school? It wasn’t until my mid-thirties that I learned why school had always been so difficult for me. I was an undiagnosed dyslexic. People with dyslexia literally and figuratively see things differently from other people. Often, dyslexics are more creative. They solve problems in unique ways. And they have their own ways of learning.

I’m not the only doctor to be rejected time and again, and go on to have a successful career. I’m not even the only hospital president to do so.

Not everyone is cut out to be a doctor. But “if you can conceive it,” and if you’ve got the ability and “guts quotient,” you can overcome some very long odds, and make your vision a reality. Our fate is in our hands. Believe in your vision, and your biggest “mistake” can become the best decision of your life.

Delos M. Cosgrove, MD, is CEO and President of Cleveland Clinic.