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Beliefs

What I believe, and what never made the CV

Principles

01

Do good for the sake of doing good.

Not for recognition, not for reward, not for leverage. The work is the point. Do what is right; let the consequence follow.

02

Be the leader and strength that the world needs.

Don't wait for permission. Don't wait for someone else to go first. If you see a problem and you have the ability to act, act.

03

Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Take the lead when you can see the way. Get behind someone better placed when you can't. Both are honorable. The only real failure is to plant yourself in the road, guarding your ego or your turf, while the people doing the work have to go around you.

04

Light the dark, and uplift those who stand in need.

Strength is for service. Knowledge is for sharing. Every advantage is an obligation to help someone who doesn't have it yet.

05

Reject convention when conviction demands it.

Don't be trapped by dogma and other people's thinking. I chose not to enter the surgical-residency Match, leaving medicine's conventional path to build AI for it instead. The decision made no sense to most people at the time, but it's already proving prescient.

06

Solve from first principles.

Don't rely on existing tools for new problems. Understand the problem deeply enough to build the right tool.

07

Work at the highest leverage.

A surgeon helps the patients who make it to the table; software can reach the people who never get to a doctor at all. Same effort, orders of magnitude more people. Work where what you do multiplies the most.

08

Proof over pedigree.

Some of the brightest folks I've met are from my rural hometown in the Midwest. Some of the dumbest folks I've met were at Harvard. Talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. See the individual, not their resume.

Off the CV

A running list of the unusual, the improbable, and the things I actually did. The kind that never make it onto a CV. Different fields, one pattern: get in over my head, then build my way out.

  1. 01Walked on to a rugby team and won a national championship.Grit
  2. 02Spent two years as a missionary in South Korea, and still speak Korean.Adventure
  3. 03Grew up working a cattle farm in rural Ohio.Grit
  4. 04Built an industrial-grade hardwood-furniture shop out of a one-man garage operation.Built
  5. 05Assisted in surgeries on global-health expeditions in sub-Saharan Africa and the Himalayas.Adventure
  6. 06Chose not to enter the residency Match. Taught myself to code instead.Curiosity
  7. 07Published some theoretical physics, mostly out of curiosity.Curiosity
  8. 08Shipped an open-source genomics engine that reached the Hacker News front page after someone else posted it.Built