Promotion can recognize the work, but it should never become the reason for the work. The deeper goal is to stay grounded in purpose, pace yourself for the long race, and remember why you started.

As a pediatric surgeon, I am trained to remove what threatens life without destroying what makes life worth living. Every operation teaches the same lesson: precision matters, humility matters, and aggression without understanding causes irreversible harm. Watching today’s approach to immigration enforcement, I see a familiar and dangerous mistake. We are cutting broadly instead of carefully, treating difference as disease, and accepting collateral damage as inevitable. Medicine learned long ago that more force does not mean better outcomes. Justice, it turns out, must learn the same lesson.