Dr. Michael DeBakey was a god-like figure in the world of surgery, he performed in the neighborhood of 60,000 surgeries, invented over 50 medical instruments, had a pioneering role in developing the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) units, the artificial heart, as well as a slew of other surgical techniques.
As a 23-year-old medical student he invented the roller pump, a critical component to the heart and lung machine that makes open-heart surgery possible. In developing this pump, DeBakey couldn’t find any useful device in the medical literature, so he went to the library and started studying pumps of various formats created over the past 2000 years. He found his solution in the 19th century.
He also developed a type of ventricular assist device (VAD)—a device that replaces partial function of a failing heart—which isn’t particularly surprising taken in the context of his other achievements, except he invented it in his 90s.
Dr. DeBakey’s achievements are astounding, but the thing I find most fascinating about him is a comment by Dr. Sanjay Gupta in a blog post about DeBakey’s passing: when DeBakey was asked what accounted for his inventiveness he attributed it to reading one new book a week, even reading the Encyclopedia Britannica when he was younger.
This was striking in light of how many people claim that they don’t have time to read. A 2005 Gallup poll reported that only half of all Americans read more than five books a year; yet, according to a 2006 Nielsen Media Research study, the average American watches four hours and thirty-five minutes of television each day. There isn’t a lack of time to read, the time is just diverted elsewhere. And, surely if the greatest living surgeon had time to read, anyone does.
The majority of people who claim they don’t have time to read tend to be bogged down in the daily grind of their work, from entry-level positions to the executive level. They get stuck in the execution; they confuse busyness with effectiveness. It’s not surprising that these types feel they don’t have time to read: they are caught in a web of constant doing—it seems like hard work.
The Nobel-prize-winning structural biologist Max Perutz once said of James Watson, one of the co-discovers of the structure of DNA, “Jim never made the mistake of confusing hard work with hard thinking.”
And look where hard, effective thinking got Watson and DeBakey. And, they both read, a lot.
This quest to learn isn’t just characteristic of great scientific minds, it’s also characteristic of great business leaders. Howard Schultz went searching for the future of the Starbucks business, and found it in the cafes of Italy; Sam Walton made frequent trips to all of his stores to see what was working and what wasn’t and how he could use it to improve the business of WalMart; and, Oprah has transformed her love for knowledge into empowerment for her devoted fans through Oprah’s Book Club.
Reading books are not only a great way to learn but also a great way to extract yourself from the web of busyness and can provide valuable insight for many dimensions of your life.
So, next time you feel busy, sit down, read a book and reflect. How can the ideas change your business? How can they change your life?