As a surgeon you have to have a controlled arrogance. If it's uncontrolled, you kill people, but you have to be pretty arrogant to saw through a person's chest, take out their heart and believe you can fix it. Then, when you succeed and the patient survives, you pray, because it's only by the grace of God that you get there.

There are really two things that drive New Year's resolution success. Number one is telling somebody about your goal. Chances are, they'll either join you in pursuing it or at least support you. Number two is to be concrete and specific. You don't want a goal like "becoming a better person," because there's no objective way to judge that. It's got to be something like "I'm going to call my mother once a week." Or "I'm going to cut my body mass index to 25." It can't be fudgeable.

Surgery has trained me better than anything else to connect with people.

If you want to be healthy and live to one hundred, do qigong.

I get up in the morning and do a seven-minute yoga workout. I know the most likely time I'm going to do something is when I first get up, and I make it short because, like you, I don't really want to do that first thing in the morning.

Medicine has always been my calling.

We don't need sugar to live, and we don't need it as a society.