The Surgeon In The Room

It was at a Mastermind with high-level entrepreneurs who have a ton of responsibilities, commitments, ambitions, and roles. This is at work, at home, and within themselves. And like anyone else, the way to maximize your ability to handle it all is by being more efficient and optimizing your life.

It’s within that context that the metaphor of being the “surgeon in the room” was presented. What does that mean? In a hospital setting, a surgeon does only the thing that they’re uniquely qualified to do. They ensure that their time goes exclusively into the highest leverage activities and processes. 

There’s an orchestra of things that need to happen, yet they’re not involved in any of it:

The Charge Nurse makes sure the room is set up correctly...

A nurse practitioner consults the patient beforehand...

A Scrub Tech double-checks that they have all of the right equipment...

The billing department works with the patient’s insurance to process billing...

Everything else facilitates the surgeon’s role - to safely complete the surgical procedure.

As you think about your growth trajectory, how can you be the surgeon in the room? What can you delegate within your work so that you’re not bogged down in menial tasks? What chores and errands do you have on your plate that could be outsourced as a service or to support staff? 

And then, what parts of your life require you and only you? In what ways are you impossible to replace, or you refuse to be replaced because it’s so fundamental to who you want to be or how you want to show up? The argument is, everything else should be set up in such a way that you’re enabled to do that at the highest level possible.

Taking a practical approach, not all of us have the means to get help in all non-essential areas of our lives. Finances, knowledge, and others needs act as constraints. And if that’s the case, my encouragement would be to become clear on what the first opportunity would be. This is your first step toward redesigning your life so that it’s more supportive in creating what you envision for yourself. 

Serious life change is mistaken for being massive, sweeping, and disruptive. But more often than not it’s iterative and an evolution over time. You have the ability to guide the direction of that growth, and that happens by removing one constraint at a time.