We're Not Saving Lives...

By Frank Addante

I have used the old saying "We're not saving lives here" many times when things
get too serious at work. However, I don't think I ever understood the full gravity of this statement until this past week when my dad had to have an emergency open heart surgery.

Through this experience, I learned a couple very valuable lessons that I would like to share with all of you.

My dad, Anthony, is only 51 years old and had never been in a hospital before this week. He had always received outstanding results from his physicals. So, you can understand how surprised I was to get a phone call from my family saying that they thought he was having a heart attack.

Dr. Silver was the first surgeon I have ever met. The night before the surgery, Dr. Silver was explaining the process and risks involved with open heart surgery to my family. As he was standing there explaining the surgery in a very serious tone, I couldn't help but think to myself "this guy saves lives." And he was about to save my dad's.

How can Dr. Silver stand there calmly and matter-of-factly explain to someone that they potentially have a 5% risk of complications developing from surgery and that they could possibly die? As he says "5%", I think to myself "that's not that much." Then he further clarifies "that's 1 in 20." Why does "1 in 20" sound so much worse than 5%? I know 20 people. (With marketing, I've always believed that absolute numbers have far more impact than relative percentages.)

People have different ways of consuming information. For me, I analyze it. Knowing nothing about medicine, the only way for me to break this down, in a non-emotional way, was to analyze it in context to what I know - starting companies. I tried to pretend the surgery was like starting a company. Starting a company involves a lot of risk assessment and risk management, so I tried to apply these generic principles to this very serious life and death information that I was receiving. I am certainly not trying to suggest that they are even remotely comparable. There is absolutely no comparison, but it was the only way for me to digest all of the information, sanely. Being an optimist, I thought to myself "there is a 95% success rate." If I had a 95% success rate in starting companies, launching products and selling, I would be, by far, the most successful entrepreneur ever to live. If only 1 in 20 of my products failed, or I only lost 1 in 20 deals that I pitched that would be remarkable. But, when I fail, people don't die. How do you assess the risk of failure when you only have one chance at success? I think about the things I have written in my blog, things like "make mistakes", "fail fast"... I sure hope surgeons don't read this blog.

Then, Dr. Silver explained that the way they decide whether to proceed with a surgery is relatively straight-forward: "Do the benefits outweigh the risk?" If the answer is yes, they proceed. After all of the tests, the analysis, the research, the statistics, the potentially fatal risk, the emotion... For these doctors, the go/no-go decision all came down to one thing -- focusing on whether the benefits compared favorably to the risk.

At work, it is easy to get hung up on all of the risks. It's easy to over-analyze. It's easy to get stressed. It's easy to fear making mistakes. And it's easy to fall into the trap of feeling like things are as serious as "saving lives." But, even for those who do save lives -- it seems as though it comes down to one simple test: "Do the benefits outweigh the risks?" If so, proceed and don't look back.

If it works for people who save lives, then it works for me.


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P.S. - This week, I learned a lot more about heart disease than I cared to. The information is astonishing. Heart disease is the #1 cause of death in the U.S. There are over 500,000 open heart surgeries performed every year. The number of cases continue to increase every year. There is still a lot we don't know about this disease, but we do know that there are ways to decrease some of the risk factors: eat healthy (low-fat/saturated fat, low cholesterol, low sodium), exercise / stay in shape, avoid smoking, decrease stress, get regular check ups.

In today's highly competitive and busy world, we are spending less time taking care of bodies and spending more time taking care of our careers, our houses and other material belongings. It seems as though many of us tend to take better care of our cars than we do our bodies. We take our cars for regular oil changes, we change brakes when they squeak, we wash them when they get dirty and we take them for regular tune-ups. Today, we have so many choices; requiring us to think and stress so much more. We have far less time and a plethora of conveniences; causing us to exercise less. Eating and sleeping have become more of a nuisance rather than a refueling; so we put more garbage chemicals, fat, cholesterol and preservatives into our bodies. I know this has little to do with this blog's topic of starting companies, but I learned a big lesson this week -- if you don't take care of yourself, you can't take care of anything else.
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Thank you to my dad for being strong and teaching me yet another valuable life-lesson, albeit a very difficult one for him. Thank you to all of my friends and family for their support during this difficult time for my family. And thank you to Dr. Silver, and all of the other doctors in this world, for saving lives.