just following on that mentorship thing. It's great to have somebody like Matt who pops up, and he's now one of the team physicians at Tufts, so he's taken over a part of my jobs in the past. Do have to have disclosures. I don't know if you heard my last lecture, that our fellowships and registry will take money from anybody, so there aren't. And it's one of those things that we, unfortunately we really do rely on industry for at least part of our educational process. So brief personal history, and this can be interactive. I don't really think it's appropriate for me to be lecturing you, and I think the folks that you ought to be listening to are your more senior members, the folks that have been part of this group, or founded this group, Mary and others that were the starting members of this group, because they're the people that are looking, how can we get the next young group of leaders to take over the process? And I think one of the great things that organized orthopedic surgery has done in the last 20 years is to have resident members. That didn't happen when I was training, so I finished my orthopedic residency, which at that point was five and a half years as opposed to five, I did a six-month on-call. My last six months I was on-call 24-7 for six months. I took one week off to paint the house, that was my summer vacation, and otherwise it was just working. But I had the privilege of having Jack McGinty for six weeks of, excuse me, six months of resident training. He, at that point, worked at Newton Wellesley Hospital in Boston, and he was one of the founding fathers of ANNA, and he was the first president of ANNA. So I learned orthoscopic surgery early on, but I couldn't join ANNA or AOSSM until I was actually board certified and then a member of the academy. And I think at least the way things have gone on since, it's great that you can join as a younger person and be part of the group and try to get integrated into it. So things that have helped, I did my first ANNA committee, was on the fellowship committee in 1993. I taught multiple OLC courses starting in 96, and Matt asked me how many it is, and I don't know, it's someplace between one and two a year for the last 25 years, so it's a bunch. I tell people, it's like a bad weekend on call. When you're on call, you're up all the time, you're on your feet, you're working, and you go back to work Monday morning and you haven't caught up on anything, and that's what an OLC course is. You fly to Chicago on Friday afternoon, you're part of the didactic session on Friday night, you teach all day Saturday and a half a day Sunday and you go home, but it's rewarding. You're passing on to the next generation, particularly for the resident fellow courses. So it's one of those things that I tell you, how are you gonna get rewarded in ANNA? How are you gonna rise up the ladder if you wanna be on the podium, if you wanna be something else, and you don't have to be a speaker all the time. If you wanna be something and give back educationally, you have to volunteer and do work. So multiple courses, let's jump down. I don't need to go through all of this. So I think one of the best things to really weigh in on how meritocracy and the topic of this is supposed to be meritocracy is how are you gonna get rewarded because of your contributions as opposed to your name, as opposed to your sex, as opposed to your anything else. It's by doing the work. And one of the best place to start is to volunteer to be a reviewer for JARS, for the arthroscopy journal. It's something you can do on your own time. You can do it on a Saturday morning before your wife and kids wake up. You can do it, just fit it in any place. But the promotions within JARS are based on your contribution to that. So I went from a reviewer and liked to review. I thought it was a great way to learn more, wanted to be critical about the literature. They come back and put you on the editorial board because now you've been reviewing three or four papers every six months, and they say he does a good job, he does it on time. And the next thing, they put you on the editorial board so you get three or four papers a month now as opposed to every six months. And then I ended up as an associate editor where they were doing three or four papers a week, but got rewarded for it. And that adds up. So if you are part of ANA and wanna advance and wanna feel like you're contributing, like we got J.T. Tokish over there, we've got Lou McIntyre, we got Jim Stone who's second VP now, or first VP, first VP. So we got first and second VPs in the room. They got there because of their contributions to the association. There's no question that that's how you get to where you're gonna go. And it's not based on who you know or not based on where you came from, it's what you've done contribution-wise. And there are a myriad of ways to contribute to the association. And all of them are valued, at least as much of them. So if we look at the definition of meritocracy, and it's a term that came out of political system, obviously, it's how do you create a governmental system that rewards individuals on the basis of your talent, effort, and achievement. So there's nothing else that contributes to it in this association. So, and I served on the board for 12 years, beginning way back in 2002, when Steve Burkhart was president at that time, and learned from being on that board that everybody is considered based on their contribution, that it really is a meritocracy. Dave McGuire first put it into a presidential address, and I actually sat down and reviewed all of the presidential addresses from the beginning that I could lay my hand on. And Dave put it in stone, and put it into the history of the association on words. And Dave was a community hospital doc in Alaska. And he got impassioned about arthroscopic surgery. He didn't have anything, any connection to anything that would make him be somebody that you would connect to a leadership role. But he got passionate about it. He got involved. He contributed on a regular basis. He was fortunate that he is a patent owner for the, or he was, unfortunately Dave's passed now, a patent owner on a cannulated screw, and he made a fortune. So, but that was from his passion with arthroscopic surgery, and he was a contributor, so he did well. So, as I said, JARS is where it's most formally tracked, but it's tracked everywhere. Get on a committee, doesn't matter which one it is, volunteer, you'll get a letter, an email from, I guess it's the chair of the committee on committees who's the second VP. First VP? First VP. So it'll be from Jim Stone this year. You'll get a letter asking you to volunteer for committees. Volunteer for all of them. If you think you can do the job, and as we've just heard from Brian, if you are gonna volunteer and say yes, you have to contribute. You can't get your name on the committee and then not participate in the meetings and not show up for the meetings. You have to be there, you have to, as you're part of the committee, volunteer on that committee to do the committee work that needs to get done, and none of this stuff is necessarily easy. Some of it's easier because you can do it on your own time, but definitely try to get involved early on. If you're a resident or fellow now, keep doing it, just volunteer. Keep doing things. The other thing that I tell folks is the Traveling Fellows Committee, that's something that if you've been five years in practice, so for the guys that are out of fellowship now, been out for five years, and remember, as an orthopedic surgeon, when you say guys, it's non-sexist. Everybody's a guy. It's got nothing to do with sex or gender or anything else. It's purely, it's all members of the team, but submit your name if you're interested to be a traveling fellow because it really is an opportunity for you to learn and meet more people that are higher up in Anna, and the more you know, the more chances you are to get appointed to the next thing and keep going forward. So this program, I think, is really great. As I said, the senior members of the Emerging Leaders Group are the people that you should be talking to because they know better now exactly where they are than a 71-year-old over-the-hill former president who kind of remembers the way things used to be, but it's all getting a little bit fuzzy now. So just as I said, volunteer, volunteer, volunteer, and I think that's all there is, but I'll give you a few minutes for questions. I don't want to screw up whoever's running the schedule. Mary, are you in charge? Yes, sir, but there's time for one or two questions if anybody has any. John, tell us a little bit about maybe the defining opportunity or opportunities that you have within Anna that you think would sort of help add to that. So I'd done a lot of work. I volunteered and I did all that sort of things, and I think getting to the level of an associate editor on JARS was one of those things because you'd get to that level and all of a sudden you're visible to the board of directors. And then there was an open board seat and Rick Myers and Bill Beech has left. Lou knows Rick. Rick Myers put my name up. Rick was a former president. I'd gotten to know him just by being friendly with him. He put my name in to get on the board, and so from that I got on the board, but part of that's chance, but a lot, part of it was really work, and it's just, it's doing the work, and you're here, you're in this room because you have a commitment to passing on. You wouldn't be here if you didn't want to be an emerging leader, and you understand that to be a leader in medicine, there's a bunch of things you have to do, and you have to be a leader in your community. You have to be a leader in the operating room for all of the staff that's there, and you want to be a leader in this association because you see the value of what we do as an association for teaching. That's what we do. We do two things that really count. I think one is teaching and two is advocacy where we advocate for the reimbursement and access for our patients to physicians, and our physicians to get appropriately compensated so that you can do what you need to do and maintain a practice. Any comments? Lou, you're the other senior person here. You and I are the only, we're the, actually, Jim and I are the two old farts. Okay. Nobody's old here, come on. Yeah. No, so I just echo what you say about just showing up, you know, but Woody Allen, he says that 80% of life is just showing up. Show up and do something valuable. You know, I spent a lot of time at the fall course. We don't have the fall course anymore, but it's LLC, I was at the LLC all the time, and then I always wanted to be on the education committee and was kind of pushing for that, but instead they asked me to be part of the advocacy committee, so, well, I figured, well, you're gonna give me that ball, I'll run with that ball. So sometimes you gotta do something maybe that you didn't think you were gonna do, but I'll tell you the truth, I really am happy it turned out that way because we actually got some really important things done, and that's the only reason I became president of this wonderful organization, was from a body of work. Yeah, you know, that overworn phrase that if you're not being an advocate, you're not, you're gonna end up being on the menu, you're just gonna end up being eaten up by somebody else, so, you know, go out and we need advocates. You know, that's one of those things that, who is it now, Eric Stifel's in charge of the, yeah. So, you can approach Eric, as everybody said, and you've heard it over and over again through this meeting, we're all approachable, we're here to make sure that the next generation comes in, contributes, I mean, Donnie's back there, he's sort of, he's kind of hiding in the back, but he's somebody who's a huge contributor to the association and is, you know, midway into his career now. How many years in practice are you, Donnie? 21, so yeah, midway, I've practiced 40 years, so you're hopefully approaching halfway through. All right, thanks everybody.

volunteer work

arthroscopic surgery community

industry in education

organized orthopedic surgery

resident member