Chapter 02: An Early Desire to Become a Doctor and a Range of Interests and Gifts

Chapter 02: An Early Desire to Become a Doctor and a Range of Interests and Gifts

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Description

Dr. Fisch recalls that he decided to become a physician at the age of eleven, inspired by physicians on TV shows. He notes that his grandmother took his interest very seriously and bought him Gray’s Anatomy. He also observes that he was “drawn to complexity” very early and that this interest became a theme in his career.

Dr. Fisch talks about his high school experience, recalling that he was a motivated, hard worker with many extracurricular activities. He also explains why he considers himself a creative person, noting that his style creativity lends itself to working in groups, a characteristic important for conducting team science. Dr. Fisch explains that he loves team science for the way it brings together people from different disciplines. He makes observations about his inspirational style of leadership, noting that his love of leadership roles began in high school. He also notes that he is at his best when he is in the state referred to as “flow.”

Identifier

FischMJ_01_20150205_C02

Publication Date

2-5-2015

City

Houston, Texas

Topics Covered

Personal Background; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents; Personal Background; Discovery, Creativity and Innovation; Professional Path; Leadership

Transcript

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Was there something that tipped you into that decision?

Michael Fisch, MD:

I think the thing that tipped me into it is a totally immature thing, which was the TV show Emergency! Squad 51. It was, like, a paramedic show. People of a certain age may remember this show. It’s an old-fashioned show with a couple of paramedics, but they were popular and they were helping people and doing dramatic things to make sick people better, and it just seemed awesome. And as a little kid, when I showed interest in that sort of thing, I got lots of positive feedback from my family. I have no physicians or health professionals in my family, but being interested in that realm seemed to get positive attention, so it became, you know, the typical snowball. And then I remember my grandmother, who, ironically, whose last name is Doctor, Gus Doctor, D-o-c-t-o-r, she’s not a doctor, but shortened from Doctorowitz [phonetic], Russian Jewish ancestry. But Gus Doctor, my grandmother, got me Gray’s Anatomy, a big daunting anatomy book when I was eleven.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Wow.

Michael Fisch, MD:

Of course, I had shown this interest in this sort of stuff, and then I started trying to read Gray’s Anatomy and trying to see the body and trying to name the names of the muscles that were the ones that I was using when I was playing ball in the yard. Where’s my deltoid and where’s my gastrocnemius? You know, stuff that is super cool when you’re eleven years old to try to figure out. And there’s so much information and so much complexity, so I became drawn to complexity, which is really, in a sense, the theme of my career is trying to manage complex information and put them into conceptual frameworks and try to discover new ways of doing things that work well for patients, for care delivery, things like that. So that’s sort of how it all got started for me, sort of at the intersection of sports and the body and then medicine.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah. So tell me about selecting a college. What were you thinking about doing at that time?

Michael Fisch, MD:

Right, yeah. So at that time I went to Chantilly High School, where I played baseball there on varsity team, and I had played some basketball up through JV before focusing on baseball. I was also on the debate team and was interested in—again, that was sort of information management complexity, right? We used to carry these file boxes with all this evidence, these little file cards with arguments and evidence and things you could speak about in your debate. So managing that information and trying to articulate it was fun for me. In high school, it was sort of foretelling because it’s true today as much as it was then, I sort of had a very ordinary raw ability mentally. My SAT scores were good but not extraordinary. I wasn’t a National Merit Scholar guy. I wasn’t somebody who wowed anybody in the sort of raw intellect, but I was really a grinder, and I had more “want to” than anybody. I loved to learn, so I got the math award and the science award, and I think I got three or four awards at graduation, where I was clearly—like I would be on the math team where none of my scores would count, like I was a disqualified math—and I think on the math team I never solved a math team problem in my whole career. I mean, I couldn’t figure anything out that I hadn’t been taught. You know what I mean? But I was a good math student. I got pretty good grades because I worked at it. I was interested enough to even endure being on the math team and maybe be a junior or a senior and have basically seventh or eighth graders who were really the scorers, right? Sort of in a sports sense, that would be very insulting to have the younger guys—girls and guys who could outperform you dramatically. But, anyway, it took a certain humility to even do that, but sort of a lot of “want to,” a lot of enthusiasm for learning and applying knowledge.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Well, and interesting, too, that you were—so many people, particularly in younger grades, they’re looking for simplicity. I mean, that’s often what you’re taught in school is what a real answer is. You strip away complexity and you go for simplicity. But you had, very early, this sort of inner compass that said, “No, complexity is where my center of gravity is, my intellectual center of gravity is.” So that’s unusual. That’s interesting. It kind of goes against the current. (laughs)

Michael Fisch, MD:

Yeah, I think so. And to bring that back to sports, it just sort of occurs to me that in the most recent Super Bowl, the hero of the Super Bowl was an undrafted free agent who happened to be on the field at the biggest moment in the Super Bowl and happened to make the biggest play in the history of the Super Bowl. So sometimes it’s not the people whose pedigree would predict great things, but it has to do with timing and opportunity and “want to.” I mean, not knowing that player in a lot of detail, I bet you if you were interviewing that player, the story would be that that player loves the game, has always worked at it, and was thick-skinned and willing to do what it took to kind of get himself in the position to be able to play the game he loved, and then happened to be in a position to do something spectacular. So, you know, I don’t claim to have done anything spectacular, but I would sort of more resemble that kind of person in my field as compared to a first-round draft pick, you know, a National Merit Scholar who went to Harvard and who has achieved in the top 1 percent on everything they’ve tried to do. That’s not my story.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Do you consider yourself a creative person?

Michael Fisch, MD:

Yes, I do consider myself creative, and I’m drawn to roles and opportunities where there’s creative potential, but I’m not at all creative in the aesthetic sense. Actually, I just took some test called a NEO-PI in an academic leadership course, and it was judging different parameters of you. Like many of these things do, they characterize you. But I scored very low in aesthetics, so I don’t make things prettier, you know, but I’m creative. So I can’t draw and do graphic art or have any sense of that, but I’m creative in the sense that I like to be asked questions, “How might we—?” blah, blah, blah, you know. “How might we drive better value in cancer care delivery? How might we think about suffering in patients who are towards the end of life due to advanced malignancy? But these “how might we” questions that lead to conceptual creativity, that’s where I’m creative, yeah, and that sort of work doesn’t lend itself to individual achievement. These are often, by their essence, team projects, so team science is what I love and being able to interact with others, not just individually interact with patients and families as a physician, but interact with teams of doctors and teams of researchers and people across disciplines, because how we might have one perspective, depending on whether you’re a social worker or physical therapist or whether you’re a sociologist or an epidemiologist or basic scientist. I mean, these very different perspectives lend themselves to these “how might we” brainstorming. And then it’s one thing to brainstorm, it’s another to execute, right? So execution is everything. It’s everything in sports, right? You can brainstorm and have all these theoretical plays. If you can’t execute any of the plays, nothing good will happen for your team. You can brainstorm a whole pitching game plan. If you can’t execute any of the pitches, you’re going to lose. So “how might we” is conceptual but then also an execution issue and relational issue and requires leadership to execute. You have to inspire others to follow willingly along some sort of conceptual plan, and if you can do that, there’s a chance that you and your group will execute something, and if you never get there, then nothing comes of your ideas. And your ideas, by the way, are a little hard to identify as your ideas anyway. Attribution of ideas becomes very unimportant, in a sense.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Do you consider yourself an inspirational leader in that sense, or charismatic or—yeah, I know it’s sort of hard sometimes to apply those words to yourself.

Michael Fisch, MD:

Yeah, I don’t know. I think so. I mean, I think I’m drawn to want to be inspirational and charismatic, and when I’m at my best, when I’m in a role that’s working and I’m in flow, I think I’m that. I think that’s a fair description of me. So I think that that’s right, but it might be like asking somebody, “Are you a homerun hitter?” And they might say, “Well, when I’m at my best, when I’m doing what I’m trying to do, when I’m effective, I am.” Not everybody would say that, right? Some people hit for average and are effective in other ways. But in that sense, that is the kind of hit I’m trying to make many times and so—

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

When did you know that about yourself? When did you first experience flow, for example?

Michael Fisch, MD:

That’s a very good question. Yeah, that’s a good question. I think most people experience flow for the first time in their lives when they’re in sports. You find flow in maybe playing basketball with others, where you seem to know where to go, you seem to have a feel for where your teammates are going to be, you seem to know how to stop the other team from doing what they’re trying to do, and you just feel like there’s a certain flow to what it is you’re doing, and you’re also kind of focused and locked in. So you’re just enjoying, you know, concentrating and watching and sort of effortlessly seeing the right things happen. That’s, I guess, what flow feels like, and you probably experience that, if you like sports, in some sort of sports endeavor. Maybe for some people it’s a swimmer who gets into flow, but for me it would be in a team sport where there’s other people to relate to and to have a sense of where they’re at, how they feel, where they’ve moving and such, and have a sense of your opponent, being able to sort of gauge or anticipate your opponents. So I experienced it there. I think I experienced it some early in my life in debate where you need a certain flow at times. You know, it can either click or not click or flow or not flow. And writing is another place where flow can occur or not occur when you’re trying to put ideas into some form that can be seen and shared and revisited and giving birth to that. So I don’t write creative things. I don’t write music. I remember trying creative writing at different times in my early life and always being very impressed with my creative writing and finding that everybody who read my creative writing was very unimpressed with that. (laughter) But writing of ideas rather than stories, the ability to create stories, again, sort of newly imagined stories didn’t work for me. To me, maybe creative writing and music would require the same sort of domain of talent that I didn’t seem to have. But sharing ideas and then trying to lucidly lay those out was something I could do better and found that I could do better. So I’d say critical writing about creative writing, right, like writing about Hamlet or something in English class, that’s a different thing, so I could do that sort of thing in school. Then I liked to lead. I think I was involved with Student Council in high school, and I was involved in college as a resident advisor and with a coed service fraternity called Alpha Phi Omega that had the chance to lead projects and to be basically doing teamwork with other people, you know, how might we serve our community by building a playground and how are we going to pull that off and when are we going to do it and what do we need to do it and how do we get the right donations to get—you know, those kind of things where you needed leadership and execution and some amount of imagination.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah, sort of multifaceted projects and—yeah.

Michael Fisch, MD:

Multifaceted, and you had to have a sense of what you could contribute and what you were good at or not good at. So I wouldn’t, like, be the guy who would be the architectural designer or anything, right? I’d be the guy who’d carry a piece of wood from Point A to Point B at the time of the project. (laughs) You know, got to know who you are.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah. But maybe you could get donations. (laughs)

Michael Fisch, MD:

Yeah, get donations or think of it, or get people to want to even do the project, to attract, to mastermind it, in a sense.

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Chapter 02: An Early Desire to Become a Doctor and a Range of Interests and Gifts

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