Anthony Chin-Quee | How Looking Within Can Change Your Life for the Better

Srini Rao: Tony, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. 

Anthony Chin-Quee: Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

Srini Rao: Yeah, it is my pleasure to have you here. So you have a new book out called I can't save you. And when I heard about your background, both as a doctor and having grown up in a immigrant family, I thought to myself, okay, there's a lot you and I have in common that we have to talk about.

On that note, before we get into the book, I want you to start by asking you what was one of the most important things that you learned from one or both of your parents that have influenced and shaped who you've become and what you've ended up doing

Anthony Chin-Quee: with your life? Oh man, just jumping right in.

Let's see I can start with my mom. I'd say if I were to just choose one thing that she taught me or that I learned from her

It was the importance of trying to listen to your emotions. Which was, I think, a radical notion in my greater family of West Indian immigrants. But my mom's a psychologist. And she brought that vocabulary to us as kids, very young. And even though we resisted often those lessons of interrogating yourself were always there.

Yeah. Yeah. As far as a thing I learned from my dad I wrote a whole book on that. We'll get into that. I got the sense that you have a very complicated relationship with your dad.

Yeah. Yeah. It's been, an interesting lifetime with him. Yeah. It's funny you mentioned this whole idea of interrogating your emotions, because I think that probably you and I share this in common and I'm curious if people from West Indies have a lot of overlap with Indian culture, because I know there are a lot of Indians in the West Indies.

Srini Rao: Only, I know there's only because my dad watches cricket. So the West Indies comes up a lot, but I don't know about you, but for me, one of the things that was really. A parent during my childhood was that you just didn't talk about mental health. There was this sort of huge stigma, like the sort of like implicit narrative was that therapy was for crazy people.

And then I think all my parents, kids started getting divorced they started seeing people as friends and suddenly that narrative changed. I'm curious, one, what was that like for you? Because I, I feel like that was just one of those things we swept under the rug. We did not talk about it. It was such a taboo

Anthony Chin-Quee: subject.

Yeah. And I think we're probably very similar in that regard. My, half my family's from Trinidad and that's where we have a whole lot of Indian folks in the population. So that's probably our, where our crossover is, but I think that even to this day even in my generation of my family, we have young men and women who are just now starting to try to put.

words to these kind of complicated emotions and mental health issues that they have. Because in my parents generation and the generation before that, it was just like the vocabulary didn't exist. And not only did the vocabulary not exist, but the idea of letting That sort of vulnerability into your life and into your family, I believe for a lot of folks in, in probably our shared cultures just wasn't an option.

Srini Rao: Why do you think that isn't and how do you see that changing with the next generation?

Anthony Chin-Quee: Yeah. I think I, I can't speak to My great grandparents and like the folks who came way before me, but I think it there's some similarities because whether it was, we're talking about the diaspora to the West Indies from all over the world my family is from Africa and from China or we're talking the diaspora to America.

There's Much riding on your ability to be strong, to persevere, to be resilient in the face of most of the time. Your journey entering into a population looks down at you that hates you, that makes life dangerous for you. And so your own mental health and your emotional wellbeing.

Culturally had to come second or fifth or 10th, or never, you know what I'm saying? Because we just convinced ourselves we just have bigger fish to fry. We have to survive first and foremost. And wherever we are at inside our heads, that can't be our priority. And I found speaking to a lot of friends of mine and people in my family that's often the case.

That people who had very severe mental and emotional health issues they just became weird uncles or strange aunts or depressed grandmas we're not even depressed grandmas, but just mean grandmas, no one ever knew how to talk about it. That trauma trickles down into each subsequent generation.

And it's only now in my generation, in some of my cousins, siblings. We're finally starting to ask these questions is it normal for me to feel this way? And has, have my parents been feeling this way their entire lives? I have my grandparent. And what does that mean for me? So that's.

That's the short version of why I think that is it's interesting. So I, my, my one sort of exposure to Trinidad was when I was growing up, we had a family friend who was from Trinidad and I remember going over to their house was like, damn, these are the biggest rotis I've ever seen in my life.

Srini Rao: They're big. Massive. I just so distinctly remember that. I was like, wait, this is like the size of a roti that people in Trinidad eat. Why are these things so damn big? Speaking of the culture you mentioned a sort of a lot of overlap. And one of the things that you say in the book is about the fact that you're put on this path and funneled into it.

You actually say in the book that truth is, I don't think I've ever been called to do shit. I probably just felt funneled into this path because of my West Indian family. If you're a super kid, a bunch of upwardly mobile Jamaicans and Trinidadians will encourage you to be either a doctor like my PhD mom or a lawyer like my currently disbarred father.

These professions are sure things low risk because the world will always be in need of your services and lucrative because the world respects your skill set and compensates you accordingly. Now, obviously, that stood out to me as somebody who was raised in an Indian American family where the narrative is doctor, lawyer, engineer, or failure.

Fortunately, my sister satisfied our family quota. My mom will deny this to the day she dies, but she... Told, I had told her once that I had this friend at school who said his mom said, I won't go to my grave in peace unless you become a doctor. Of course he didn't become a doctor. And my mom said something similar and she'll deny that to the day she dies.

But so I assume that the narrative around your household was very similar, like to a typical sort of Indian kid household based on this part of the book. My. I think my journey through that was slightly different than that, because I don't think that I was directly pressured by either of my parents, but the expectations were part of my culture, part of my greater family.

Anthony Chin-Quee: So I didn't have a mom or dad who was on me about you gotta be a doctor, you gotta be a lawyer, but because I just, I was a smart kid, I excelled. Throughout school that all that pressure to excel was really my just from me. That's just how I came out personality wise.

And when I looked around for options of what to do with my life within my family, within my community, there were really only those options, doctor, lawyer, engineer, the same thing. And so no one ever, just like I said in the book, no one's ever Yeah. Be an entrepreneur come up with your own business.

And I was an artsy kid. I was in plays. I was doing music all the time. I love that stuff, but a career in music or anything like that was just, it was looked down upon by my family and even though they never told me directly, I ended up looking down upon it too. And so I ended up, I think, feeling funneled into medicine and along the way, learning to justify it to myself and beating into myself that, yeah, you really want to do this.

You really love this. So go for it. I feel like

Srini Rao: that's so common among so many Indian kids. I always said people just choose from the options in front of them and are blinded to the possibilities that surround them. You have these people who will commit to a life path, 18, and I'm like, how are you making decisions about how to spend the rest of your life when you've only lived a fraction of it?

This is absurd.

Anthony Chin-Quee: No I completely agree. And both my wife and I both had our second awakenings in our the late thirties and left our respective professions to do other stuff. You just, there's so much time to grow up and I don't think that was the case with our elders and the generations that came before us.

We were, we just have so much more time to figure things out. And the age, and I think maybe this is part of the the millennial malaise that's come over the planet the age of deciding what you want to do by age 18, especially for kids who have certain options and are of a certain degree of privilege.

I'm not going to say that we're not because. Not everybody has those options kids like me who we're like solidly like middle class, lower middle class growing up in Brooklyn you go to school, you go to a great school where everybody there is a super genius and they can't think inside of the box for the life of them.

And you can't tell any of those kids just be this. Like they just it was incredible when I went to school and I met these kids who just think about ways to really, ways they can change the world, like actually do it and create this path out of absolutely nothing with the building blocks of what their family told them were possible.

They just use them as long as they need to, and then they throw them out. And it was amazing to me to watch and to. to be around that. Of course, I felt like I was a fish out of water and totally inadequate around all of that genius. But but yeah, it really opened my eyes to What's possible when you're not saddled with, or you realize that you're not saddled with the safest and most conservative choice.

This ACAS podcast is sponsored by NetSuite, 36, 000, the number of businesses which have upgraded to the number one cloud financial system, NetSuite. 25. NetSuite just turned 25. That's 25 years of helping businesses streamline their finances and reduce costs. One. Because your unique business deserves a customized solution.

And that's NetSuite. Learn more when you download NetSuite's popular Key Performance Indicators Checklist. Absolutely free. At netsuite. com slash optimize. That's netsuite. com slash optimize.

Srini Rao: Yeah. I appreciate that you brought up privilege because I think that as in part of doing this kind of work, there was a period of time in which I really questioned my parents advice about pursuing a stable career paths.

And then I had a moment of realization. I said, you know what, I'm looking at this completely wrong. They're giving me this advice based on a completely different context. The one that they grew up in where. I'm sure probably similar for your parents. They come to this country as immigrants and your risk is not an option, at least in India at that time, it was like your.

Outcomes are binary. It's poverty or security. So why would anybody risk poverty? But I think that privilege piece is important. One thing that I am very curious about is what your parents taught you about race, because I do, to be candid, I didn't look you like, look up your picture. I've written before I read you before our interview today.

So when I saw you on camera, I was like, Oh. That's what you look like. I was like, yeah, that's not what I imagined in my head. I was, I, one, I just wasn't sure what to imagine based on all the things I read in the book. So I'm very curious what did your parents teach you about race? And did you have to deal with all the things that African American kids do when it comes to race?

Anthony Chin-Quee: Wow. So that's one of the larger questions. And Yeah. You can join the club, honestly, about people who are surprised to meet me. That's been my entire life. But as far as what they told me, taught me about race,

trying to figure out where to start. I know it's a big question. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about what my parents tried to teach me about racism. I guess that those are my earliest memories. Yeah. And what it meant to be black in. A world that was predominantly white and schools that were predominantly white and professionals that were predominantly white.

I think like many I can't say like many in my family, I know that, and I talk about this in the book, my family tried to shield me from it to a certain degree. Tried to shield me from inequities and racism that was going on around me. And I remember. Very specifically this experience when I was a kid and we were graduating from fifth grade from elementary school, and I and everybody who knew me knew that I had the highest grades in that school.

I was the valedictorian all the parents knew that they knew I was the smartest kid. They knew I nailed everything. But when it came down to actually receiving the award at graduation, it went to someone else. And I was stunned and I could tell my friends were like, wait what just happened?

And my parents were just muttering in the back. And then I asked them about it. later because I was so sure and then at that moment they had a choice. They had a choice to tell me the truth and tell me that the world was going to be unfair to me for the rest of my life and to just buckle up and risk the psychological damage that might do at that time to a 10 year old.

Or they could tell me a lie about what happened and tell me that I guess you, you weren't the valedictorian. I guess you just got to try harder next time. And at that point they chose to lie. And I don't know, looking back on it, if there was a correct choice there. It's one of the conundrums of being a persecuted minority in America like there is no right way to navigate it.

But even though they lied to me, like I knew something wasn't right. And I didn't quite know what to do with that. And so I watched, I think we grew up in in a heavily West Indian populated section of Brooklyn. And our culture was all around us and we celebrated it, we had close family.

It was great. And so we didn't, Or I wasn't exposed to a lot of direct persecution or understanding of what racism really meant when I was super young. But then I went to private school and I went to a really wealthy private school on the other side of Brooklyn. I had to travel for 45, 50 minutes on the train

,

just to get there every day.

And that's when I started learning some new things about how the world viewed me when I was. One of three or four black students in a class of 65, 70 kids. I had to learn some stuff really quickly. And still, I think if I'm going to keep it focused on my parents and how they prepared me or tried to,

tried to shield me from things, I think

that my mom, I think really did her best to shield me from the questionable and

And my dad didn't really, I don't remember him addressing many of the things directly or talking to me about them, but like I say in the book, like his experiences from his past kind of seeped into the lessons that he tried to teach me. And so when I talk about that, I'm talking about my dad was.

He had a pretty challenging road in a lot of respects, but as far as race was concerned he was an outcast even in Jamaica because he was half Chinese. And so he got constantly called out and ridiculed by Jamaican kids for looking Chinese. And I think you understand it from the Indian perspective, like the colorism in the West Indies is aggressive there's a lot of colorism based self hatred that goes both ways.

You can't be too black, you can't be too light skinned it's just, it's a no win. And so my father was coming from that and then he became an immigrant in the States and he had to deal with. Being black in, in, in the States, being an immigrant who didn't speak the way other black people did, the way other Americans did, he had to try to lose his accent.

He got shaped when he went to law school, he went to law school in Indiana and he lived on the wrong side of the tracks in Indiana and was constantly terrorized. by, by white people there to the point that he had to leave the school and transfer and come back to New York.

And I and probably lots of other experiences that I have no idea about, but he was coming from a place of a lot of anger and a lot of resentment. And I'd say he, he wrapped a lot of his identity up in the fact that he had to live in this world that white people controlled. But he had absolutely no control.

And when it came to being a parent, and this is me extrapolating because this is, I don't know what he actually thought or thinks I felt that he really tried to

make warriors out of us early. And tried to instill in us,

That anger a lot of his misogynistic tendencies that came down to me in the form of him trying to instill in me that misogyny, especially where white women were concerned, was totally fine. I never understood it as a kid. He used to tell me this stuff all the time, but I grew up thinking white women deserve to be treated a second class.

I fought against it so much, but the seeds were planted there. And I, it took me decades to understand or try to understand why that would be, why he would say those things. And I think it was really to so that I could be an instrument to get back at all the people that wronged him because of what he looked like.

I think every family.

of non white origin in America has their unique story. I wouldn't generalize my story to anybody. There are probably those who do feel that, but I know there, there are so many different flavors that the, these really painful experiences can take on. So I think this is just mine.

And. It's one that I hope some people can relate to and try to encourage them to try to digest it the way I did, because it takes a long time. One thing that

Srini Rao: I wonder about out of morbid curiosity, the Indians I think are very fortunate in that we're lucky because we're stereotyped as model minorities, right?

We basically run the biggest tech companies in the world, we're all doctors and engineers. And if we own a 7 Eleven, we own 200 of them for those of you who don't know. For you, and I wondered this are West Indians basically categorized race wise the same way African Americans are?

And do you like, when you, how old were you when you looked in the mirror and realized, okay, wait a minute, there's a part of my identity that falls into this racial category?

Anthony Chin-Quee: Yeah. So I think to outsiders who are not black, then West Indians fall into the same African American stereotypes. I learned just how much black people are not a monolith when I went to college.

I, where I grew up, everyone who was black was from the islands and their families were. So I just thought culturally, that's just what we were. And the way we view ourselves is pretty universal. And then I went to college and I made friends with lots of folks who were. Children of West African immigrants first generation children of black people who had been in America for generations, children of the South and all sorts of like folks from all sorts of different cultures and the ways in which we viewed ourselves and viewed our self worth and viewed what our limitations in America and in life were.

We're just so vast and it really, it was really difficult for me to grasp that. I'm going to generalize here a little bit West Indians especially those coming from certain islands, there's competition among the islands and different feelings about different ones, but Jamaicans, Trinidad, Trinidadians, especially those coming to the States around the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies.

There's a certain pride that they had. I think they even in a new country when they were facing trouble they really had held their heads high in general and thought Yeah, I heard this is the place where I can get an education and really have a great career and job.

So I'm going to go ahead and do that and whatever I encounter along the way, I'm going to, I'm going to keep trying because. Culturally, that's what I was taught. My, my grandma came here and was, she became a nurse. My, my grandfather came here and became this civil servant that had a lot of a lot of Poland local politics my dad came here and became a lawyer and then you have when I got to college, I met these children of West African immigrants and.

Man, were they confident like they, there was, I was amazed at how much the race based politics in America seemed to hit them differently, if at all, because they, it almost seemed friends of mine really. They never thought anyone was better than them. They could go toe to toe with anybody, no matter what color, regardless of this country's history, they knew their worth and they were going to show everybody.

And I thought that was just so fascinating. Because on the one hand that's incredible. And I didn't know how to live without that kind of sense of impending doom that. That kind of rests over you as a a black kid growing up in my experience. But then in, while it was incredible to me, I also was fearful for them.

I was just like, man, what happens when your confidence takes you into, leads you into a situation where things really get dangerous if you don't, if you don't sense that. that danger is all around you. How do you keep yourself safe? And then I had these friends who, whose families were roots were here in the States, in the South.

And to me, their

Constant consciousness of what white people were doing, what they were capable of, what,

what violence they could bring, what injustices were around the corner. Really, like a lot of their identities were wrapped up. seem to be wrapped up in what white people say we can do and they say we can't do. And when we would have discussions about the state of the world and our ambitions and all of that sort of stuff when we were young and I'm learning from everybody a lot of my friends would I would be confused as to how they could put limits on themselves.

In the way that they already had that the glass ceiling was just so much lower and they almost seemed beaten by a lot of it already. And that is a frame of mind that I didn't grow up with being a West Indian immigrant. Those are just a couple of examples, but I'm so grateful to have had that experience and made these friends from all walks of life because

Man. It's I think it just makes you a more well rounded person person of color in this country to know just the breadth of the experiences that come to your people. Cause at the end of the day, no matter where we had come from we were going to be seen, or we were already seen in America as just black, like all of us.

No matter where we came from. And so we were going to go ahead and face the exact same experiences. But we were coming at these experiences from these very different baselines. And I just found it super interesting.

This ACAS podcast is sponsored by NetSuite. 36, 000. The number of businesses which have upgraded to the number one cloud financial system. NetSuite. By Oracle. 25. NetSuite just turned 25. That's 25 years of helping businesses streamline their finances and reduce costs. One. Because your unique business deserves a customized solution.

And that's NetSuite. Learn more when you download NetSuite's popular Key Performance Indicators Checklist. Absolutely free. At NetSuite. com slash optimize that's NetSuite. com slash optimize.

Srini Rao: You hear that sound? It's the sound of a sale. You're missing out on because you're not selling on Shopify. And what does it sound like with Shopify? This is the commerce platform. That's revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. When I was in college, I had so many ideas, but executing them was a different story because the resources were limited and the path to bringing those ideas to life was anything but clear.

If only a platform like Shopify had been around then, I could have transformed those ideas into reality with a lot less struggle. It's really remarkable to see how far we've come and how platforms like Shopify are empowering entrepreneurs to turn their visions into tangible businesses. So whether you're hustling from your garage or gearing up for an IPO, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run, and grow your business without the struggle.

Shopify puts you in control of every sales channel. So whether you're selling satin sheets on Shopify's in person POS system, or offering organic olive oil on Shopify's all in one e commerce platform, you're covered. And once you've reached your audience, Shopify has the internet's best converting checkout to help you turn them from browsers to buyers.

Now let's talk about growth. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. It's not just about having an online store. It's about having a powerful platform that can scale with your ambitions. And Shopify powers 10% of all e commerce in the U S and as a global force, powering big names like Allbirds, Rothies, and Brooklyn, and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across over 170 countries, plus Shopify's award winning help is there to support your success every step of the way.

This is Possibility, powered by Shopify. Sign up for a 1 per month trial at shopify. com slash unmistakable, all lowercase. Go to shopify. com slash unmistakable to take your business to the next level. That's shopify. com slash unmistakable. Speaking of these baselines we did an episode sometime, I think right after the George Floyd incident about what it means to be black in America, weaving together a bunch of different clips from various podcasts.

We had a guy named Chris Wilson here who wrote a book. Call the master plan and he had spent some time in prison and I wanted to bring that clip back to get your take on this. So take a listen.

Anthony Chin-Quee: Folks like when they're from the grassroots level, sometimes at least like in these neighborhoods can't even comprehend like these policies are put in place.

You can look at something like. The 1994 crime bill act that was put in place

Srini Rao: and all these people started getting locked up in, in mandatory sentences for crack

Anthony Chin-Quee: versus like powder cocaine and all these things that were put in place was deliberate. And then you can look at CUD with the housing practices of not allowing folks to get home loans based on their race

Srini Rao: or just a whole bunch of stuff.

And. It makes a huge difference when you talk about generating wealth for community or improving stuff. And it's

Anthony Chin-Quee: like that all that stuff is deliberate.

Srini Rao: It's all on purpose.

Anthony Chin-Quee: What do you make of that? I think that's completely true. I think that I think he's right on. I think that the the baseline of America is that it's a country built on racist ideals and policies and those policies have continued over the years. They've been refined. They're just baked into the way this country works. It's all just systemic. And yeah I see no falsehood in what Chris just said. Yeah, there's so many systems that have been deliberately erected to keep black people in a lower station.

In America,

let's talk

Srini Rao: specifically about your time at Harvard. I think there's one thing that struck me that you said about Harvard, and I related as a Berkeley undergrad to this statement. You said for all its mystique and clout in the end, I'm pretty sure Harvard is nothing more than a really expensive fucked up social experiment for smart kids.

Everyone on the planet knows the name Harvard, lots of people dream of going there. And because the school accepts fewer than 5% of its 60, 000 valedictorian applicants each year. Everyone assumes that the kids who make the cut are super geniuses, and that includes the kids who are accepted. No student would ever say it out loud, but each of us assumed that the student sitting next to us was the next Albert Einstein, or Stephen Hawking, or Barack Obama, and that shit there was stressful because at the end of the day, we were teenagers.

Being exposed as the one non genius who'd managed to slip through the cracks was a constant source of anxiety for all of us. And I always thought to myself, I'm the person who slipped through the cracks for Berkeley's admissions policy. There's, it has never made sense to me that I got in talk to me about that.

And because I think that this is this is not even about race. This is really a commentary on the state of our current education system.

Anthony Chin-Quee: Oh, yeah. I think

I even though, cause Harvard was, I can only speak to my experience, but Harvard was so interesting because of that, all the mystique and all that stuff. I would assume that more so than at other institutions. Once you arrive you feel like you have to find your place in this sea of geniuses, cause everybody.

has to be a super genius to get here. And so where do you fit? And it's no one I go on to say from that passage, like none of us talk about academics none of us will talk about our grades how well we're doing and that sort of thing.

And so none of us, Any,

let's see. Yeah. None of us. We all feel isolated, I think is what I mean to say, because no one talks about the anxiety that clearly everyone must be having. Everyone feels alone and you're trying to figure out just, okay,

,

everyone's a genius at, what am I a genius at? I'm not sure.

There's the things I was really good at in high school, I'm pretty mediocre at here. So where do I, how do I start over? It seems like everyone else has this figured out. So that was really challenging. And I didn't realize the degree to which my roommates who I always looked at as way smarter than me and just always had their stuff together, they were always feeling the same way too.

We still didn't talk about it, even when sophomore year, we all got super depressed and I grew out this like really sloppy Afro and never shaved and my other buddy like shaved his head and had to go tea for a while. But then realized goatees were gross and got rid of it.

And this we were listening to like Ben Folds five, like every night. The real, just sad stuff and but we didn't talk about why we might be sad. We were just all in a massive rut. And I think that sophomore sadness is a, is actually a pretty widespread thing in undergrad college.

A lot of people go through it, but even then we wouldn't confide in each other the stuff that was really going on. And we were just sad and we'd just, we'd party harder. And we'd do really make really poor decisions together more often. It was really fascinating looking back on, but but yeah, I think that's one of the consequences of going to one of these highly competitive schools.

Walk me through the

Srini Rao: sort of trajectory from Harvard to becoming a doctor to writing this book. What was the impetus for writing this book? And then let's finish this up by talking about your relationship with your dad, because I think that seems to me like really in a lot of ways what this book was about.

Anthony Chin-Quee: Yeah, so short timeline. So I, I did all my pre med classes while I was in college. And after college, I wasn't really sure if I wanted to go to med school. Yeah. I actually took a couple years off, I was actually a high school teacher for a little while in, in the middle of Massachusetts and pretty quickly realized like even though I love teaching I realized it wasn't, teaching that capacity wasn't for me long term.

And so I looked back at the med school idea. And went full bore on it. And so I applied to med school the next year ended up doing med school down South in Atlanta at Emory. And after that and we can, I don't want to go into all the stuff that happened in med school, but med school was hard.

And I ended up getting matched into ear, nose and throat surgery where I did my training in Detroit. So I packed up and moved to Detroit. And residency training for throat surgery is five years long and residency is way harder than med school. And so I think I was, I actually remember the day that I realized I had to write this book and it was in the middle of residency and I was in the middle of a pretty major depression episode.

And I was sitting there, I was laying there, actually this part's in the book, I don't want to spoil it, but it's the, in the middle of the book I was alone I had been asked to leave my job, I just failed this massive test that I needed to not fail and I'd been having a lot of really dark thoughts about myself and my worth and my life.

And luckily, I had just started some medication for this depression episode, and as I as the medication worked and the fog sort of burned up, I sat myself down and said you need a reason to keep going. You need a reason to go back to that place that seems to want to kill you so very much.

Or you need to quit. And so what's your reason for staying? And I sat there and I realized that I was totally unprepared for what the world of medical training and of medicine was going to be. I'd read a lot of books, I'd read a lot of memoirs, I'd read a lot by doctors and I just felt that they hadn't given me truth enough to be prepared for the journey that I was on.

I think that in the end, doctors when they write stories about themselves, in general, they want to look good at the end of the day, they want to look good to the reader. They still want the world to look up to them. And so that's how these narratives have often been painted that and they often want to tell the reader that despite whatever difficulties.

They faced along the way, medicine and their patients saved them their love for the medicine, their love for their calling was the, and ended up being the most important thing and that's what got them through. And I thought it was bullshit because that wasn't what I experienced.

That wasn't what my friends... Who were right there with me had experienced like we were miserable and we were like just being stripped of everything that made us ourselves every single day. And we weren't sleeping, we're barely eating when we're eating trash we're like any vices, any broken pieces of you that were part of you before you started the journey.

All your defenses against them getting out get stripped away. And so we're all just acting out in whatever way we could because we were still kids trying to figure ourselves out and there was so much we didn't know about ourselves and we were just brought to the brink of what we can handle.

And we were really messing up a lot of time and the world of medicine was unforgiving. The job was unforgiving and the patients don't always make it better. The beauty of what you are learning to do isn't this salve that makes everything go away. So I was just like, you know what?

Maybe some folks out there feel the way I do about this journey. And maybe this would be really good for people to hear before they. enter into this journey. And maybe those of us who are in this world reading a story like this will, will gain the courage to demand that we do this much better.

And so that was the genesis of it. And from that point on I just started making notes, like keeping journals of my experiences for the next couple, two and a half years trying to remember these moments that I knew would be really important, whether they were highs or lows, and then I started writing it after I graduated and spent seven years.

writing the whole thing. So yeah that's the birth of the book. I appreciate that so much because I think you're right. I've read a lot of those medical memoirs myself, like all the ones that Atul Gawande has written, as well as the ones by Paul Kalanthi. And you're right.

Srini Rao: Like in this book, I got a very sort of different picture. I was like, Oh, so all these people who are running around and scrubs are not these responsible members of society that we pitch them to be when they're treating us, they're as screwed up as the rest of us.

Anthony Chin-Quee: Yeah, it's really hard for doctors to be vulnerable unless they're sick and dying.

Yeah. That's the closest that I see them get on the page. Yeah. I saw the experience with my sister and she basically said you get thrown in the deep end of the pool and she's and you get there the first day, she's you don't know jack shit despite being in med school for four years.

Srini Rao: She's it's, you're just thrown in the deep end and

Anthony Chin-Quee: clueless. Your sister is 100% correct. Let's finish this up

Srini Rao: about by talking about your father because there was one thing in particular about this relationship with your father that struck me that you said towards the end of the book. You said, no matter what I accomplish in my life or who I become, no matter how faithfully I demonstrate his traits or how defiantly I strive to embody the opposite, no matter what, I'm never important enough to him.

He doesn't want me. So talk to me about this

Anthony Chin-Quee: relationship with your dad. Yeah. It took me a while to realize that the backbone of the story that I wanted to tell was about my relationship with my dad because I've gone through so many different phases of, over the course of my life and all I ever wanted was peace with the relationship and I just had no idea how to get there and I didn't have the tools.

The story of me and my dad is interesting. because he's not like a dad who was never there. And he also wasn't super present. So he's somewhere in the middle, which made it uniquely difficult for us because he was, he, we grew up with him until we were like, I was like in my late teens.

But he's, he was never really there. And never really present for his kids. And I learned a down the line that a lot of that was due to his pretty severe mental health issues. And his issues with addiction he was a gambling addict and that was something that was kept from us for a really long time.

And it was something that was this really malevolent force in our household because no matter what time with us. was never as important as his addiction. And when you don't even know that there's an addiction as a kid it just, the experience is so painful and so empty you're just hoping that maybe if I do this, maybe if I say this, maybe if I excel in this way he'll pay more attention.

He'll want me around. He'll show me this love that I hear other people get from their parents. And then I grew up a little bit when my parents got divorced and I was like in my teens and early twenties I learned about the depth of what he'd been navigating and. The ways in which he treated us and my mom and people around him, and I just got so angry.

And I just walked around with this anger for just years. And it would seep into the way I navigated the world, the way I sabotaged myself the way I went into relationships and just left destruction in my way he was all over that stuff because I just, I was trying to run so hard from what I thought he was.

I had no idea where I was running to. I got something I used to say to my early therapist was that I just, I don't know how to be what I've never seen. I know all about what I don't want to be. But I don't know how that helps me become who I want to be. And so that was this underlying conundrum in my head for just years.

Along with all this anger. And I had to get to a point where I could let that anger go. And getting to that point was really difficult. I had to confront my dad about, How I was feeling and I thought that confronting him and saying that stuff out loud was going to be the key to me stepping forward, but it was really just a very small first step because in the end I had, I, even though I let go of the anger, I understood where he was coming from and it was, his story really sad story.

I just kept holding out that someday. My father would act like my father someday he might get better. Someday he might realize that he can just pick up the phone and call me and I'd pick up. And maybe that would be the piece that was missing for me. But that turned out not to be the entire truth.

It took a really long time. I had to learn who I was and what I wanted to be independent. of him. I had to step out of this idea that I was just like this embodiment of his worst qualities and his mistakes. I thought for so long that genetically, because he was depressed, because he was an addict it was only a matter of time before that happened to me.

It was only a matter of time before I got into a relationship and then destroyed it. It was only a matter the idea of being a father. I was my biggest fear for my entire life because I just thought there was no way I could do it in a way that didn't end up in a disaster.

And I had to really painfully and with a lot of work, beat those notions out of myself and learn that I had, despite myself been embodying. all the traits that I was searching for,

for years. I'd been the person I wanted to grow up to be independent of him. And in the end if he was gone, if I if he's really gone, like it wasn't going to be because he left me, it was because it was going to be because I chose to let him go from a place of acceptance of both him and myself.

And I think that's the whole journey. And for me, I realized as I was putting this book together, that medicine and becoming a doctor and going through all the horrors therein is really just the context for this journey. For my journey of figuring myself out, figuring out the things holding me back as far as the relationship with my dad.

I had like without medicine to crush me and bring me as low as possible. I don't know that I would have built myself back up in the way that I wanted to. Amazing. This has been just absolutely fantastic and eyeopening and thought provoking. So I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews with the unmistakable creative.

Srini Rao: What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Anthony Chin-Quee: I think the thing that makes us unmistakable is when we allow ourselves. to listen, truly listen to who we are and who we've always been. We all pop out into this world. I believe with our personalities completely intact and the world just needs to get out of the way, but often the world doesn't.

And lots of people, lots of things, lots of forces act on us. traumatize us, take away from who we were meant to be who we are deep down. And I think finding your way back to the things that you love, the things that you're passionate about, the things that have always made you tick since you were a baby and letting those things out into the world.

We'll make you on the same amazing. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom and insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, the book, your work and everything you're

up to? Yeah I am on Twitter as many of us are, so you can search my name, Anthony was at CQ underscore MD.

And that's where I post a lot of my. Book related stuff, and I don't post a lot of my thoughts on the world, but sometimes I do, and I like to think they're sometimes interesting. So that's the best way to find me.

Srini Rao: And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.

Anthony Chin-Quee: By Oracle. 25. NetSuite just turned 25. That's 25 years of helping businesses streamline their finances and reduce costs. One. Because your unique business deserves a customized solution. And that's NetSuite. Learn more when you download NetSuite's popular Key Performance Indicators Checklist. Absolutely free.

At netsuite. com slash optimize. That's netsuite. com slash optimize.