Benjamin Carson Interview (page: 5 / 9) Pediatric Neurosurgeon	Print Interview

You've made history in more than one way, by performing operations that people thought couldn't be performed -- in one of the most highly specialized and technical and challenging areas of surgery -- and by being the first black man to do this. Which of those things is more important to you?

Benjamin Carson: The most important thing to me is taking your God-given talents and developing them to the utmost, so that you can be useful to your fellow man, period. That is by far the most important thing. And, you know, whether I happen to be the first black person to do that, or the first person, period, to do that -- which is the case in both situations -- I don't know that that's particularly important.
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So you're not motivated by that.

Benjamin Carson: I am definitely not motivated by that.

The thing that really motivates me right now, to be honest with you, is the opportunity to get other people to understand what's important in life. What's important in their life, and what's important in the life of our society and in the life of our nation? I really believe that that's what civilization is all about. And, it doesn't have a whole lot to do, quite frankly, with the accumulation of wealth, and titles, and degrees and power. Even though, interestingly enough, when you do develop your God-given talents and you become valuable, you know, those things just seem to accumulate.
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But that should not be a person's goal.

The goal should be to become a valuable individual, and I believe that that's what success is all about. And the more people we can get to understand that, the better off we're going to be as a nation. And I believe it becomes particularly important when we're talking about America, because this is a nation that is composed of so many different kinds of people from so many different places. And, if you look at the globe right now, and you look at all the ethnic strife that is going on, you realize the tremendous potential for destruction that exists in our country, if we don't begin to channel our energies in the right ways.
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And begin to think logically and begin to outline what our visions and our goals are. Begin to stop attacking our leadership, so that individuals who really do have leadership ability would be willing to step forth and lead.

We need to learn from the past. We need to look at history and understand how the great empires of the past went into decline. Many of the things that they did are things that we are doing now. I believe that we're smarter than that as a people, and that we do have the ability to turn it around. That's my real goal in life. Neurosurgery is only a vehicle whereby to do it.

What was your mother's reaction when you said you wanted to go into medicine?

Benjamin Carson: She said, "Of course you can do it. If anybody can do it, you can do it, except you can do it better." That was always her mind trick. "You can do anything anybody else can do, except you can do it better." She kind of brainwashed us into thinking that we had some kind of special powers, which I don't think we did, but I think everybody is special if they believe they're special, because there's so much potential in each human being. When you look at the human brain and how little of it we actually use, how little of our potential we actually use, if you can convince somebody that they've got a lot of potential and get them moving in that direction, then obviously they are going to be persons of accomplishment.

So are expectations are a large part of performance?

Benjamin Carson: Without question.

I remember once going to a school system in Yakima Valley, Washington, and the school official said to me, "Don't expect the kind of reception you usually get," because these kids were from reservations, they were from migrant families, and he said, "They have a different set of values. So, don't take it personally if they don't listen. Don't even be offended if they throw things at you." Well, of course, that's exactly what you want to hear. And, when I went into the auditorium, they were jumping over seats, they were shooting paper wads. I mean, it was a madhouse. And, I just quietly went up to the microphone and I started talking about what it was like living in an environment where you walk into a room and turn on the light switch and it looked like the wall was moving because there were so many roaches, and rats that were big enough to move garbage cans, and sirens and gangs and people lying in the street with bullet holes in their chest, and how my two cousins that we lived with got killed. And, then I started showing them how they could use their fingers to calculate, instead of just doing addition and subtraction, how they could do multiplication. You could have heard a pin drop in that room. When I finished, standing ovation. They wanted pictures and autographs, and the school officials said, "Who are these kids? We've never seen them before." I said, "They're the same kids. It's just that I just spent an hour telling them what they could do, not what they couldn't do."
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It's just a matter of raising expectations, and I think this is an area where we've largely fallen down in this country. That's one of the reasons we've created a scholarship program. We've created reading rooms in different schools where the kids actually get reward certificates for reading, which they can trade in for gifts and all kinds of things.

We've got to get them excited and start them at an early level, unless we want to go the same route as other pinnacle nations have in the past. We're not the first pinnacle nation, but every pinnacle nation in the past declined. There came a lot of sports and entertainment, lifestyles of the rich and famous, they lost their moral compass, and they went right down the tubes. Maybe it's inevitable, but if we're going to avoid that, we have to start with the youngsters and we have to create the right mind set and the right set of values.

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