What can we learn from a kidney transplant?

Dr. Joseph Murray, the first doctor to successfully transplant an organ, died last week at the age of 93. More than 600,000 people have received an organ transplant since Dr. Murray developed the procedure in 1954.

Not that he sat down and figured it out in a burst of genius, as the broad brush strokes of history might lead us to believe.

Behind every great action is an incredible amount of hard work and failure. Six patients died before Murray’s first successful transplant, and another 30 died as he tried to figure out how he could transplant between people who were not related.

Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and medical writer, summed up Murray’s career in an NPR interview (link) - “He (Murray) understood that science is a dead end alley, and you sometimes just find an opening. It is not a eureka moment, it is not necessarily an act of genius. He was modest about the fact that it required creativity and insight, but mostly it required sticking to this problem for a couple of decades before they really solved it.”

There are two things I take away from this. First, Murray’s success was based on his perseverance, his ability to learn from his failures, his willingness to get out there and try even when the odds were stacked against him. He wasn’t necessarily any smarter than anyone else, he was just more tenacious. Certainly he had innate intelligence that helped him succeed, but his grit was the real key to his success.

Second, Gawande uses the word “they”. Though Murray was the leader, he was part of a team of surgeons and nurses without whom he could not have succeeded. This was not a problem that an individual could solve – kind of like those big problems our iCons students want to tackle.

We so often see only the successful results of any experiment or process that we don’t think about just how difficult it is to make a big breakthrough. It leads us to feel, in our own life, like out first attempt needs to be perfect. Nothing could be further from the truth. The better we want to be, the harder we have to work, and the difference between those who succeed and those who fail is what they do when they hit a dead end.