Reflections on Success Dr. David Satcher

Our Challenges Ought Not Defeat Us but Drive Us

John Gardner, a former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, had a wonderful saying that I like to repeat. He would say: "Life is filled with golden opportunities, carefully disguised as irresolvable problems."

Our challenges ought not defeat us; rather, they should drive us. My own career has been driven by a challenge that very nearly took my life, when I contracted whooping cough at two years of age. My earliest memories are of my struggling to breathe, while neighbors gathered on the porch of our house to comfort my parents. It seemed inevitable that the Satchers, who had already lost one child, were about to lose another.

As we lived in rural Alabama before the civil rights era, the local hospital was not an option for us.  My father was able to find the one black doctor in the area and persuade him to walk several miles to our house to treat me on his day off.  He showed my mother how to keep my fever down and keep my chest clear. Needless to say, I survived, and my mother told me almost every day of my childhood how Dr. Jackson saved my life. By the time I was six years old, I was telling people I wanted to grow up to be a doctor like Dr. Jackson, so I could make the kind of difference in people's lives that he did.

I also take inspiration from a quote by one of my mentors, Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays. Dr. Mays was president of Morehouse College in Atlanta when I was a student there. He was responsible for educating a number of young black men like myself who were born to poor families in the rural South and were not expected to amount to much. Every Tuesday he would address us in chapel. He had a lot of sayings, but there is one I especially like to recall.

He said: "It must be borne in mind that the tragedy of life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. Don't be afraid to dream. It isn't calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream. It is not a disaster to be unable to capture your ideal, but it is a disaster to have no ideal to capture. Reach for the stars. It is not a disgrace to fail to reach the stars, but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for. Not failure, but low aim is sin."

To achieve success, you should never be guilty of low aim.