by Dr. Ryan Neinstein
For those of you who know me, you will know that I have an insatiable thirst for knowledge. There is something instinctual about learning the past. I try and take all the knowledge and wisdom I can from the lives of those before me and distill it through the lens of my own world to help me navigate the world. For instance, a lot of the ways I approach work I learned from Steve Jobs. As you dive deeper into the life of Steve Jobs you realize he developed his concepts of work from Edwin Land. Land was the genius inventor of the instant image and founder of Polaroid. A polarizing figure (see what I did there-wink wink), Land was an outsider at the time, he bet the farm on the instant camera without doing any market research. The people over at Kodak thought he was a nut and would never be able to create the instant camera let alone a company. He felt science was a method for keeping from kidding yourself and that creativity was the cessation of stupidity. These maxims are eerily similar to the ways Jobs approached his work at Apple and was a prime driver of his success. Steve Jobs once infamously said “ we don’t do market research , we create markets”.
If you keep going up the tree of knowledge you will find that Land studied Alexander Graham Bell. Bell was a student of Samuel Morse who against all nay sayers created the telegraph and the eponymous morse code with painstaking decoding the secrets of electromagnetism. If you are new here, WELCOME, I try to pass on valuable insight and knowledge about plastic surgery to help you on your journey. I find it fun (yes I am a nerd) to blend my insights into plastic surgery with the lessons I learn from reading. I read far and wide, this means I like history, psychology, philosophy, and my personal favorite-biographies. The lessons I learn helps me chase wisdom and on the road there do sensible things that have worked for others for thousands of years. These lessons from the lives of others cultivate a persistent childlike curiosity for the world.
So you may be wondering why I called this blog “Best Tummy Tuck in NYC” well, that is a good question. I named it because I’m often asked who does the best tummy tuck in NYC? This simple question made me stop and think. It made me think about my life and my legacy. Is being the surgeon who does the best tummy tuck in NYC my ultimate goal? Is that what success means to me?
So what do I do when I have an existential question? I turn to the books and explore the concept in time.
What does being successful mean? While the simplest way to measure success in society might be to look at earnings because its easy to compare between individuals and business’s but that is an anodyne way to look at success. For instance Lord Horatio Nelson the god like British sailor defined success as dying battle for one’s country. He is so adorned in Great Britain that their equivalent of the Lincoln Memorial is of Admiral Nelson in Trafalgar square. In his autobiography, Bloomberg writes that success comes from starting businesses with concrete products in the real world that create jobs and ultimately help people. Bloomberg’s concept of success speaks to me. I find fulfillment in helping my team members (that’s what we call the people who work at Neinstein Plastic Surgery) accomplish things they never thought they could. My feelings of success, like Bloomberg, extend to the people we help. I can’t think of any metric of success better than the number of people we help. Success to me means not being the best tummy tuck in NYC but being known as someone who makes meaningful positive impact on peoples lives. Listen we live in a capitalist society so I don’t want to make this blog seem like I am trying to say that money is irrelevant, what I am trying to say is you cant work 18 hour days for the sole purpose of making money. Being the best tummy tuck in NYC surgeon cant be what its all about. There has to be more intrinsic value to the work. Success to me also means loving what you do. You have to actually love what you do to be great at it. Whoever people think is the best tummy tuck in NYC is I guarantee loves their work. The person who loves their work will always outperform someone who just shows up. The magnitude they will outperform is not small, passion for the work creates huge differences in performance.
I wrote this blog to help me flush out the idea of what success means to me. The realization is that success to me is not to be The Best Tummy Tuck in NYC but to be someone of value to other people. I thought I had heard this concept of being someone of value as a means of describing success before so I turned to Google. Turns out Albert Einstein once said “Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.” I must have read that before and it stuck in my head.
Some interesting lessons from the stoic philosophers to keep in mind as we strive for success. Marcus Aurelius reflected on success in his meditations “To accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference.” When we experience success, we must make sure that it doesn’t change us—that we continue to maintain our character despite the temptation not to. I have found that just when you think you have found success you realize you are as far from it as can be. I bet when someone thinks they are The Best Tummy Tuck in NYC that moment will be their downfall. When you start to lose sight of all the things that made you successful because of pride you will surely not be successful. For instance, I am obsessed with the technical mastery of surgery especially in Tummy Tuck surgery. I am always interacting with anatomical variations that challenge my skill set. I am always looking for better ways to do things in the operating room and I get down to the minutia of movements in surgery. I never want to lose this curiosity and drive for improvement. Epictetus wrote thousands of years ago “It is impossible for a person to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
The problem with pride is that it blunts the instrument we need most—our mind. Our ability to learn, to adapt, to be flexible, to build relationships, all of this is dulled by pride. As Epictetus put it, “It is impossible for a person to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
I write these blogs to not just give patients insight into plastic surgery but to help people get to know me better as a person. Choosing a surgeon can be overwhelming so I want to help people who are considering me as their surgeon understand who I am better and more completely from what you see on social media and during your consultation.