Personal Branding and Forging Your Own Career Path

Yeah, sure — and first of all, thank you for having me on, it's a pleasure to be here. It was a bit of a wild ride, to be honest. I started off just being a junior doctor, trying to find time to do the day job and muddle my way through. But it became apparent to me pretty quickly that you can exist in the health system and be a doctor, but to actually make a change you've got to do even more than that. You've got to figure out what the system needs.

So I started doing quality improvement projects, which basically meant you'd spot a problem with the system and try to change it. That went really well for me, because it gave me this sense of purpose. I wasn't only treating patients — I was fixing the system, which I saw was really the limiting factor. You've got all the brightest minds, all the hardest workers, everybody who just wants to do really well for their patients, but they're limited by a system that means they can only treat certain amounts of people — whether it's admin, too much paperwork, staffing, or computers that take a day and a half to load up when you turn them on.

So I started gradually fixing those things. I started with a printer — there was a printer that didn't work, and I was just tenacious enough to make sure it did, after weeks. That gives you a little buzz, a little high, that you managed to fix something. All of a sudden people aren't queuing for the one printer on the ward that works.

And you start to see that by fixing these little things that block people's day, you can make a big difference. I graduated from fixing printers to, I don't know, following blood cultures around hospitals to see what actually happens to them — is there any way I can speed this up? They're meant to come back in 48 hours when they're negative, and when I was on neonates they didn't, they took ages.

That ended up sending me on a journey to write business cases, because I figured out that if you're going to make a change, there needs to be a financial case behind it. Not that I loved finance, but I figured out that to get things done you had to make a financial argument. So I shadowed someone in the finance department, I learned how to write a business case, and together we wrote a few and presented them to chief execs — leasing new blood-culture analysers, that sort of thing. Not what I thought I'd be doing in my F2.

The reason I'm spending so long on this is that it gave me the tools to do what I do now. It gave me this toolset of learning that just because you're in a system and it operates the way it does, does not mean that's the way the system needs to be. People say, "that's the way it's always been, therefore it needs to always be this way, it's never going to change." Well, actually it can. You just need to be tenacious enough, and you need to have that vision — to dream big, to be a bit cheesy about it.

So after med school I started coming across policy as a barrier quite often. A lot of these QI projects needed policy to change, or policy was used as an excuse — "ah, the policy says this." And I was like, well, let me go and learn policy and see if this is just nonsense or not. It turns out that about 50% of the time policy is a genuine barrier — but policy can change, and more importantly you can understand it. You can understand the levers and the drivers behind it. You can learn what the Five Year Forward View is, who writes it, why, what the recommendations mean, how to influence those documents and get into them. There are ways to use and leverage policy.

So I worked at Health Education England. I got onto — your audience may know this — the Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management national leadership scheme. It used to be the Bruce Keogh / National Medical Director's fellowship. They take about 30 doctors and spread them across the CQC, NHS England, Health Education England. I did a year at Health Education England doing a lot of workforce planning — finger in the wind, what's dermatology going to look like in 20 years, how many dermatologists do we need to train, given the backlog of medical students and placements. A lot of primary care, urgent and emergency care, and a bit of technology.

Then I did a bit at NHS England. I met Tony Young in funny circumstances — different story, perhaps — and ended up doing some work for him in the NHS England innovation team, which was cool. At that point I had this skill set of being a jack of all trades in innovation, if there is such a thing. I'd learned the ground floor of medicine, and I'd learned the policy side.

So what I ended up doing was joining an accelerator. For people who don't know, an accelerator is a programme that helps companies get better at something — normally startups, normally early-stage — and they either take a fee or, more usually, equity, in exchange for support. I joined one that was just being set up at the time called the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator. It helped Series A-ish companies — you might have raised about a million pounds on an idea or a technology — get into the NHS. It fitted my skill set perfectly. They launched it out of Guy's and St Thomas', linked to the Health Innovation Network, the South London AHSN — it was a collaboration of all the AHSNs, very NHS-centric.

They took me on as a "navigator" — although I was part of the founding team, a navigator is kind of like an account manager. I was looking after ten startups. I had companies like Perfect Ward, who do an inspections tool that's now scaled right across the NHS — you're nodding, you know them. Echo had been on there, Medopad had been on there, even Babylon had been on there. Loads of people have been through that accelerator.

I was there for six months, then Jenny, the programme director, went on maternity leave, so I got promoted to run the programme, which I did for a year. I saw 61 startups go through, we got 50 pilots and contracts in the NHS, raised about £30 million of follow-on funding with them, £48 million saved for the NHS in projects. Really cool experience to learn the startup side of it — to understand why and how startups think and act the way they do, and the pressures they're under.

At that point I felt like I'd got a lot of different skill sets, and I really liked the startup and technology aspect and how that can change a health system. So I met a guy called Alex and we set up our own accelerator, HS, which became HS Ventures — a venture builder. We built deep-tech companies out of young entrepreneurs and techies. We partnered with charities like Orthopaedic Research UK and invested with them into early-stage companies. We did that for a couple of years.

In the meantime I also started doing more media. I write for Forbes on healthtech, and I've got the Health-tech Podcast, which as we sit here is listened to in about 105 different countries, talking to entrepreneurs and leaders in healthtech. And as a result of everything I've learned, to cut a long story short, I now have a comms, PR and marketing company specifically for healthtech called somX. That's essentially what I do now. So — a very long-winded answer to the original question.

What I'd say is I always followed what I enjoyed. You could never have told me at 18, "you'll have a PR company at 33." It's ludicrous, I'd never have thought that. What I did was follow what I enjoyed day to day. Whenever I made a career move, I tried to improve it in some way — usually taking out something I didn't enjoy and putting in something I did. Choosing not to do audits for the sake of audits, and instead shadowing a finance person on my study leave, shadowing the chief exec, writing a business case — even though it got me no points on my reg or training applications.

That's my advice: don't go chasing points. It's not actually the destination you want to get to. I think people really underplay the value of a medical degree. I did five years as a doctor — I almost to the hour got 10,000 hours under my belt, which means I'm comfortable saying I was a doctor. I can speak with authority on what it's like to give anaesthetics. By the way, somewhere in that story I became an anaesthetist — I did core anaesthetics training. And at some point I also did a degree in education, clinical education at the UCL Institute of Education, in my F3, because I enjoyed teaching.

That's another thing, right — I enjoyed teaching, so I did a lot of it in my spare time. And that has led me to be a better communicator: to take complex problems and concepts and drill them down into simple things. Which helps me with public speaking, with all these different things. You never really know as you go through your career what it's going to become. The best thing you can do — and what you owe yourself — is to follow what you enjoy. Because if you take joy from spending time doing something, you will become great at it.

When I came out of the two accelerators, coming up to the second year of HS, I was auditing my life — where do I enjoy spending my time, where do I have energy? And I woke up and noticed: hey, hold on, you started writing for Forbes, you've got a podcast that's crept up to 105 countries, you're already advising companies on communicating and content. Maybe comms is the future here. I listen to Gary Vee like there's no tomorrow and I enjoy about 90% of what he says. So everything was telling me: here's what I'm good at, here's where I enjoy spending my time. Let's audit my life and make a change. And it's crazy — when you make a shift like that, things just fall into place a bit more.

I liken it even to spending that time following the blood culture around the hospital. It made absolutely no sense for me to do that on a day off — everybody was like, what are you doing? But it felt right for me. It was more fun for me solving the problem and writing the business case than the day job. Not that it ended up happening in the end, for various reasons — there's a lot of politics — but the point is that by auditing your life and finding out where you enjoy putting your energy, you can make a really positive change.

For people in medicine it's key. There's so much you can do that isn't always obvious. For me it was signs — you didn't want me as your doctor at three in the morning treating your grandmother, because I didn't want to be there. In my last year of anaesthetics, an appendix would come in and instead of chilling or building whatever website I was building at the time, I'd have to go and deliver an anaesthetic — and I'd have preferred to sit there building my drop-shipping website, or whatever the hell I was doing. It was a case of following the energy and figuring out that a change needed to happen.

There are always going to be pros, because you've been the one to drive it and create it. If you've changed your career so you have more variety, you probably enjoy the variety. But that's not for everybody. People mention success and say, "you're so successful," and I don't feel successful, because I always feel success is the point where you're happy, where you don't need to make any more changes. And what I've learned is that even that's a moving target — you never really get there, so it's about enjoying the journey.

For people who enjoy variety, a variable career is a pro; for those who don't, it's a con. If you absolutely love being a GP, be a GP, and don't feel any pressure to do anything else. If you love being a GP and doing management and teaching and research, then do all of that — don't feel you should only be a GP. Be guided by what you enjoy and really appraise that.

There's a very practical way I do this: I look at what's at the bottom of the to-do list. Everyone's got things that, if you haven't got them done in lockdown when you're literally sat doing nothing — if painting your front room is still on your to-do list after four months of lockdown, clearly you just need to hire a painter. I do that in my company and my life, both practically and metaphorically: what's at the bottom, where do I need to make a change? And similarly, the things you're smashing out at the top of the list — those are the bits you enjoy, and those are the bits you should double down on, because you'll probably excel if you do them all the time. So the honest answer is: there are no cons, if you enjoy it. It's about self-awareness and auditing what you enjoy.

I'd disagree, actually. Take a final-year medical student. You go to placement, you revise for exams, and you have plenty of time to do other things. If you've started a podcast, if you've got a YouTube channel, if you enjoy absorbing Gary Vee's content — what are you doing with the time you're not doing medicine? There's the person reading extra stuff and spending extra time in the hospital because they want to be a neurosurgeon and they love it. And there's the person who isn't fortunate enough to do any of that because they have to look after their mum or dad. There are so many variables. But I'd figure out: how are you spending the time you're not revising or doing medicine? That gives you an inclination of the other things you could excel at.

I was always into technology, always into the early days of social media, always keen to try new and innovative stuff. And problem-solving. What used to really annoy me — even as a final-year student — was people getting annoyed but not contributing a solution, just constantly moaning about problems. Looking back, there's nothing wrong with that, it's how people decompress. But I was different: I was never content just talking about the problem, I wanted the solution. That makes me, in inverted commas, "entrepreneurial," or an "innovator" — whatever you want to call it. It just means I'm fuelled by finding the solution rather than talking about the problem.

In F1, fortunately, my first placement was liaison psychiatry, which is a doss — you sit in an office for a long time not really doing much, and as a junior you don't have the backlog to clear. It's basically a permanently on-call job, so there's a lot of downtime. I was able to twiddle my thumbs and walk around the hospital and figure out what actually needs to be done here. Again, I didn't plan it — I just followed what I enjoyed. So that's what I'd say, dude: it's about figuring out how you spend the time you're not forced to spend on certain things, then doubling down and excelling.

The main thing I'd say is: don't run before you can walk. I never thought the podcast was going to be big. I didn't set out with those expectations — quite frankly, originally I didn't even want to do it. It started as the HS podcast when Alex and I were running HS, and I thought it was a waste of my time, just another thing on my plate. It turns out I super-enjoyed it and carried it on, and it became its own thing.

The only reason I ended up doing it was because we set it up so that we'd win when we didn't have any listeners. We asked: what can we achieve out of this podcast? We can connect with loads of healthtech startups, pull out leadership and entrepreneurial messages, learn from the conversations ourselves. So even if nobody else listens, I've had an hour-long conversation a week with an expert in healthtech, and I'm going to learn something. That was the premise. Because that was the mindset — curiosity — it was never self-serving. It was never built to be "I want to be Joe Rogan and exit for 100 million." And frankly, the podcast market is getting saturated very, very quickly.

Your listeners will know this — they listen for a reason, they're looking for insights, they're not looking to be sold anything. No one's going to listen to a podcast where a business is just selling. And that extends to individuals: if you're just there to pump your own ego and talk about yourself, what are you going to achieve? If you have a genuine intention to add value to a community of listeners — and it needs to be your actual intention — then you're going to come across as genuine, and people will listen to you for a reason.

As you get momentum the guests improve, people start reaching out. But ultimately, if I wasn't getting the chief digital officer of Novartis, or the CEO of GE Healthcare for Asia Pacific — if I was still interviewing "matey down the road" who's just thought of the next big healthtech idea and is going to build a circuit board in his garage — I'd still talk to that person, because I'm still curious, I still enjoy that hour. It just so happens that people want to listen to that. So my advice is: really question your motives and intentions, and reverse-engineer from there. If you're looking to be well known — which is fine, no judgment — a podcast might not be the best way to do it right now. But if you have the right intentions and can build a community, and you're a comedian or you make it genuinely entertaining, or it's something within medicine where you're adding value to someone — that works.

Here's another bit of advice: think about who your listeners are and really appeal to them. If your podcast is all over the place — some really medicalised language for medical students, then public-health messages for patients, then recommendations for startups and health systems — it gets messy. One thing I was always clear on was that this would add value to early-stage entrepreneurs. That can be people who are entrepreneurial, or interested, or aspiring — there are lots of ways to be interested in that.

The other thing, directly from our feedback, is that I pull out messages on careers. Everyone's got a career, and everyone wants to hear from people who've done well in one. I pull out how and why people moved in their careers to get where they are, because it's actionable — people can often just take it verbatim and do something with it. And it always comes down to two things: hard work and luck. Someone on my podcast the other day quoted a golfer — "it's funny, the more I practise, the luckier I get." It's gems like that you get from interviewing people.

So the point is: add value to a community, genuinely have that intention, and start small — set it up so that you win when nobody's listening. For 17 weeks nobody listened. Seventeen weeks, man — nobody except my mum, and even she probably didn't listen to most of it. You can't expect to come out of the gates like Usain Bolt. The production value of those early episodes was rubbish, my interview style probably wasn't great — there was loads I learned along the way. And what better way to start small than with your mates and people you already know, to build that traction and your own skill set?

Good question — and it's not something you get right all the time, it's something you learn, finding the boundary. There's one school of thought which is just be fully yourself, say and do whatever you want. That's fine, but it's going to restrict your opportunity in some avenues. Take Gary Vaynerchuk — he's told constantly that by swearing all the time he's blocking out a huge part of his audience, but he says, "I have to communicate authentically." And I think that's just it: you find your way of communicating authentically. As you go on in your career and get older, you less need to communicate in a way that appeases others — that's a function of time, and in some ways confidence.

But you have to move to the centre of a community of practice before you can influence it — and to move to the centre, you have to conform to the principles of that community. When you're in the middle, you can start moving things. To get clinicians or investors on board — the people who listen to our podcast are clinicians, investors, people in corporates, patients, entrepreneurs — the entrepreneurs will say and do whatever they want, fine, because entrepreneurs. But clinicians are going to be a bit jarred by bad language, because they don't use it routinely in their practice. Language is one thing, but the principle applies broadly: you find your way.

I wouldn't want to be someone who's unwilling to offend anybody, who just wants to appeal to as many people as possible and as a result is bland. I want to be someone who finds that boundary and communicates authentically. Naturally I communicate slightly differently than this — it's tempered a bit for the podcast — but it's pretty much there. I just know your listeners aren't going to like it if I'm dropping f-bombs constantly.

So know your audience. If you're a medical student on placement, conform, because that's the path of least resistance to hitting your goals — suck it up and conform. I wish someone had given me that advice, because when I was at Health Education England I called things out that I didn't really have licence to say and do, in ways that, looking back, weren't the right ways to do it in a corporate, government arm's-length body. There are ways of doing things at that level — passive-aggressively, putting things into minutes — it's just not the way I wanted to do things. But I found my environment: when I communicated authentically, the entrepreneurs chimed with it. And building something myself, being someone who instils culture rather than conforms to it, is something I enjoy.

Good question — and thank you for noticing that, because personal branding is a funny one. It's something I never knew as a term even when I was doing it. I can remember when LinkedIn first came on our radar, and I was really into it, really onto it, because I thought: hold on, here's a platform where I can display myself, my achievements, what I want to be — to create opportunity. That's literally how I saw it. From a career perspective, here's somewhere I can, for minimal effort, maximise opportunity. And medics were not doing it when I was doing it. Doctors were not on there — why would you be?

It's been one of the best things I've ever done, making that decision really early. If you go on my LinkedIn profile now and look under projects, you'll see a hypertension audit I did as an F1, the blood cultures — all that stuff's still on there. My point is I maxed out my profile really early, because it was a way of getting ahead of everybody very quickly in a certain area. And the reason was simple: I just wanted opportunity, as much as possible. It gave me that in weird ways. People in startups started reaching out, because by proxy they thought, "here's a doctor on LinkedIn, that's weird, maybe he's into business." Not a huge leap — and it worked.

Then it became about identity. Originally my identity was "medical student" — I hung my hat on that, except within medicine, where I had a slightly different identity. Different people will tell you different things — some thought nice, some not-so-nice — but in my head, I DJ'd a bit at the end of uni, I was into house music, we had a community that went to all those raves. I found identity in that within medicine. But externally, LinkedIn was a medium where I could control my identity almost, and move it towards what I enjoyed and where I wanted the opportunities. I had a medical-student identity, then a doctor identity, then an anaesthetist identity — and towards the end of that it was "the doctor who did other stuff." LinkedIn let me solidify that and set it in stone.

When I ended up leaving medicine — absolute identity crisis. I'm now part of this accelerator, I'm the innovation guy, but I was a doctor and I haven't really got that anymore. It was a strange time for my own identity. But I found it very quickly at DigitalHealth.London: they gave me an identity, which was helping startups and helping healthtech. That's when I became "the healthtech guy" in my own head. That took about a year of solidifying, and then it was the time where you could legitimately start creating content. I was never big on Twitter, never big on Instagram for career stuff — that's mainly friends — but on LinkedIn I found a nice platform for content. The podcast came out of it, I started writing for Forbes, and I just gradually built it up.

It's a funny one, though, because I haven't done a qualification in healthtech, I'm not an honorary professor of healthtech — I'm none of that. So in the beginning I found it difficult to put out content, because I'd think, "what authority am I?" And I still feel that way a lot. What authority am I, really? I'm someone who's had a lot of conversations. None of these ideas are my own; I'm just someone fortunate enough to sit in a position in this ecosystem where I speak to the investment side, the startup side, the tech side and the healthcare side.

So I thought: well, maybe I'm somebody who can speak with empathy across all those angles. Maybe I've spoken to enough people on all sides of the table that I can present ideas to each member of the group in a way they might not have got before. I can tell startups how investors think, tell techies what startups are looking for in a hire, tell clinicians and patients what's actually going on in healthcare — although I'm not the best at that last one. Bertalan Meskó, the digital health futurist — he's amazing at going from technology to patients and people. I'm not going to compete there. But I'm good in the startups–investors–healthcare space. So I just started putting out content, having conversations, and I found a way of doing it that meant I was never really putting myself out there — because I was always just doing interviews. No one can say an idea is wrong if I've just had a conversation with someone and put out a chat. So I get around the fear of the haters by saying: yeah, not my ideas, someone else's.

It depends what your goals are, ultimately. It's difficult to get a huge amount of attention anywhere at the moment, particularly rapidly — even TikTok has zoomed up in popularity and it's difficult there now. It'll be the next augmented-reality, VR, social-media bonanza — something like that, some AR/VR platform. Who knows what'll be next. But if you're looking to capture attention, you've got to jump on whatever it is early, and innovators and early adopters inevitably will.

That said, I think LinkedIn is still good for it, genuinely. There's so much inauthentic content on LinkedIn that anybody with licence to create authentic content can do it there and be well received. LinkedIn is very sterile — go on your feed right now and count the posts that start with "great to see," then talk about one of their own achievements. That's a huge amount of LinkedIn, because that's what people are used to. I'm not criticising it, that's just what it is. So you can stand out with authentic content, and the algorithm, I'm told, looks for conversational content and pushes it up. I use emojis; I write a post, look at it and think, "I didn't actually use that word in real life," and take it out to make it conversational.

Nobody cares that "it's great to see" I've done a podcast with Lord Adebowale. What people care about is that I've spoken to him and that I've never met a more values-driven Black leader in healthtech in my entire life — I've not met many Black leaders in healthcare at all, and speaking to him, I'm humbled by how values-driven he is: he does this, this and this in his company, and he's seen these results. That's interesting. It's also "great to see" that I spoke to him — but can you see the difference? It is great to see that your company has achievements, but it doesn't add value to anybody watching unless you add what you've learned or gained, some nugget that helps others. That's where content is going, because people have so much choice about what they absorb. They're only going to absorb what helps them, interests them, or entertains them — you've got to be hitting one of those.

I'm pointing at the somX logo on my t-shirt — that's literally what this is. Jess and I, my partner in life and work, are building a comms agency for healthtech based on what Gary Vaynerchuk says in the morning; I execute in the afternoon. It doesn't exist anywhere at the moment, because people are a couple of years behind. So there's absolute value in doing that. This is true right across healthcare — we still use fax machines. We are that far behind.

There's a relatively straightforward exercise: look at all the medical devices or systems and just write down the year they last changed. If you look at things like femtech and other devices, it's like 50 years — how has something not changed for 50 years? It's very easy then to go in and say, "I'm going to apply 2020 thinking to this problem and come up with something new." It just isn't being done, because the systems are so difficult to penetrate, for loads of reasons that would be far too boring for your podcast — but that's the life I lived in the accelerator world, trying to change this stuff. A lot of that ground can be made through good communication now: getting your word out, brand, lobbying — which is the angle we go out with. So yeah, I totally agree, mate — it's a few years behind, and that's what creates the opportunity. You've got templates you can literally read in the morning and execute in the afternoon. It's that straightforward.

It's a funny one, books and resources — I naturally want to find people. I've read the books: Zero to One, The 4-Hour Workweek, all that stuff. As somebody brought up purely in medicine, they give you this view of, "whoa, there's this other world out there, there are people who think like this" — and that's very comforting. I enjoyed reading them. Not that, looking back, I had a practical framework to apply them, but they expanded my mind and expanded what I believed to be possible — not that I believed any of it was possible for me at the time, but it set me off on that journey.

I always wanted role models, people to follow, and at the time I didn't have any. They existed, I just didn't find anybody who'd left medicine to pursue something, who thought differently, who was an open communicator. A lot of that is available now — there are communities like Tony Young's NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme: a ready-made community of doctors who think differently about entrepreneurship. You can find so much solace in there. So for people in that situation, definitely have a look.

The one thing I'd be quite bullish on: I didn't find any role models in medicine — in fact I found the opposite. I found people who wanted to suppress any entrepreneurial drive, any thinking differently. Because medicine is Stockholm syndrome — you fall in love with your captor, and when you get to the top, when you're a consultant or professor, you often can't see it. The people I dealt with — got to be careful here — I didn't find anybody at that level who even thought I could do another job. That I'd do absolutely nothing, that it'd be a massive failure.

Even when I was leaving, I sat the anaesthetic exams once and obviously failed them, because I had no interest in revising. Then I realised: I'm going to leave, because I'm not even using my time to revise. I hated it, it was a massive effort — and if you hate something that much, surely it isn't the right thing to do. In the run-up to leaving, my tutor was genuinely worried for me: "You must sit the exams, even if you're leaving." I said, "Why? That makes no sense." "Yeah, but you've got to do your exams." "Why?" "Well, you just do." It was like computer says no — he couldn't compute that I wouldn't do them. I don't judge him: he's existed in a system where that's all you know.

Taking advice from people who haven't been on the journey you want to go on — rightly or wrongly, if someone started on a journey and went back to medicine, that's an opinion and a story you need to hear. But there are people who give wonderful advice by forcing you to think through the answers to certain questions, and others who give advice very autocratically — "I think you should do this." Unless they've had a journey you utterly respect and admire, and been through what you'd expect from somebody so confident to give you a black-and-white answer, I wouldn't take it. That's what I worry about in medicine: there are a lot of people who have others' respect above them, telling them something that isn't right for them — telling them to stay in medicine, because that's all they know.

I'm not saying it's easy to leave, or that you're guaranteed anything. What I'm saying is there are a heck of a lot of transferable skills, despite what people say. You can take a year out, go travelling, and get a job. There was no point in the interviews where they could actually show me the thing that said, "you can't take a year or two out because you won't get a job, you won't get core training." Show me the evidence.

There are resources out there that can open your mind, but at some point you've just got to do something. Read the books — Zero to One, The 4-Hour Workweek, they're all here, you can Google the entrepreneurship books. You're not going to get any huge nuggets from me on that. But I would say: try to find some role models, some people who've walked a similar path, because you'll get a real richness of content from somebody who can tell you that story and who you can ask questions of.

I have a group of people I do this for. A lot of people wanted it, and I'm happy to give it, so I have a mentorship group — a lunchtime Zoom call every week or two where people tell their stories, say where they are and what they want to do, and we all help each other. We're all in the same game, trying to find our way to that success point, taking out the bits we don't like and adding the bits we do. I'm just a bit further down the road than the people in the group — but there are groups where people are further on than me.

It's funny, the lineage I'm part of: my mentor's mentor is a founder of Spotify, which I thought was very cool. My mentor got in touch with him, and he said, "It doesn't change, mate. You still send emails at 4am, you still wake up concerned. You can IPO and you still have all these issues." So unless you're enjoying the journey — unless you enjoy that up-and-down wildness of every day — you're in the wrong game. I have my moments, but on the whole it's a good journey to be on, and it feels better than being a pure medic, because personally I get more joy from what I do now. I'm jealous of the people who got their joy purely from medicine — they're enjoying themselves, they have a wonderful life. But I've had to be a bit more complicated to find my happiness.