Welcome to My HEADTalks
Personal reflections on leadership, identity, and the inherent value of meaningful work.
This week is “Monterey Week,” my annual summer vacation to visit my wife’s family in California. It’s the highlight of the year — a chance to recharge in one of the country’s most beautiful and relaxing locations. Nothing drops the blood pressure quite like a stroll along the Pacific Ocean in Asilomar or walking through the Farmer’s Market on Alvarado Street (in perfect weather).
The trip feels a little different this year. Normally, I’m taking a deep breath from life as a busy Orthopaedic Surgeon and preparing for the second half push between summer and the holidays. This year, I’m on the verge of a major career pivot. When I get back to Massachusetts, I’ll be winding down my clinical practice and starting something new.
With time to reflect, I’ve realized — I’m ready.
This moment between two identities also has me thinking more broadly about work, recognition, and what we choose to value. It’s something I think about a lot, especially when things slow down and my mind wanders to more existential topics. My professional identity is changing, but my personal ethos remains the same: Humility, Experience, Ambition, and Drive.
Welcome to my HEADTalks.
We celebrate the wrong things.
Somewhere along the way we decided that having charisma is more important than being competent. It became better to tell people how great you are rather than show them. Somehow, visibility got confused with value. Society has a peculiar obsession with the loudest voice in the room. In leadership circles, being loud and wrong often gets rewarded over being thoughtful and right. How often are great ideas ignored because they're whispered, not shouted?
Real builders are often invisible. While everyone's dazzled by credentials, networks, and story, someone else is in the back doing the hard work. We've built a culture that prizes “performing” over performance. Articulating vision is necessary but not sufficient — execution is key. (Master builders articulate and execute).
We've also confused access with accomplishment. The person with the best pedigree isn’t always the person with the best work ethic. We celebrate those who know how to work the system instead of those who have experienced it. The most dangerous blind spots in professional life are success by association and expertise by decree.
Competence can be boring. We like to dissect spectacular failures and exalt outsized victories. Instead, we should recognize consistent excellence — an engineer who ships clean code, a pilot who delivers smooth landings, a surgeon with reproducibly great outcomes. When it comes to quiet excellence, sometimes you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.
The highest performers optimize for different metrics. Recognition follows, and brands build themselves. Networking becomes more about learning than opportunism. Leadership is about showing and doing, not dictating and finding fault. Sustainable success comes from building better processes, not capitulating to personality. We've built an ecosystem that rewards the appearance of value more than the creation of it. The future belongs to those who believe substance beats style, execution beats explanation, and results beat visibility.
It doesn't matter if you're replacing joints or building new care models. If you remain humble, accumulate experiences, lead with ambition, and stay driven...
The work itself becomes the reward.
This is the first in what I hope will become a semi-regular series of “HEADTalks” where I’ll share reflections, lessons learned, and observations from this next chapter.
As I step into a new leadership role at Commons Clinic, my aim is to stay rooted in the values that have always guided me: Humility. Experience. Ambition. Drive.
Ben Schwartz, MD, MBA
Editor-in-Chief, The Surgeon’s Record
SVP, Care Services & Strategy
ben@commonsclinic.com
As a trauma surgeon and full professor I just made a huge career pivot into health tech (and practice at a private health system). In your down time you might consider checking out the book Transitions by William Bridges which I found to be super useful. Best of luck! Looking forward to learning from your experience.