I Am Obsessed. And What Do I Mean by That?

A few weeks ago, I was reflecting as I got asked to introduce myself in a private meeting with founders, movie directors, investors and opera singers in St. Moritz.

My first thought was to say that I am reimagining surgical innovation, as the cliché of a founder reimagining surgical innovation would say.

But this was a different type of event, one that forced me to look inwards a little bit more. The only word that came to my head was obsession.

And I said that after careful introspection about myself, because over the past few months, as I've been doing more panels, fireside chats and conferences, I kept hearing the same question:

What is it that I would do next, after CLARO Surgical?

And my answer is always: I do not know.

Because thinking about building something else automatically puts my brain and mental effort into finding a problem that's big enough to keep me excited, with a business case that makes sense for me to spend the following 20 years of my life building.

And I'm already spending those years building this, so I do not have the mental capacity to do the work it would take to find that next problem.

But it also comes from my belief that real success requires undivided attention.

And throughout my life, I have done exactly that.

I can summarise my journey in three stages, three goals and three obsessions that I have accomplished, or am in the process of accomplishing.

For the first part of my life, it was doing magic. Magic tricks, magic shows.

I delved into the world of magic with the obsession of becoming one of the youngest magicians in Spain to win the National Championship of Magic and to perform at Europe's largest magic festival.

And by the time I turned 19 years old, after almost a decade studying everything there was to learn about stage presence, lighting, public speaking, body language and, of course, tricks, I accomplished that.

Becoming one of the youngest magicians to win the National Championship of Magic and performing my last show in front of 8,000 people at Europe's largest magic festival.

My second obsession actually developed in parallel with magic.

I fell in love with physics when I was 13 years old. I read Stephen Hawking's autobiography, and later that year I got to visit CERN.

I got to go down 100 metres underground to visit the CMS particle detector, part of the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider.

And right at that moment, I decided that I would become a physicist who works and does groundbreaking research at CERN.

In the next few years, I worked as hard as it took.

So by the time I turned 21 years old, I was a physicist working in Geneva, first researching proton trajectories through the Large Hadron Collider and later working on the design of a groundbreaking particle detector trying to look for indications of dark matter.

And as I was finishing my work there, that urge in my brain that would not let me fall asleep at night was calm again.

I had satisfied my desire to be part of that. I had accomplished what I had set myself to accomplish.

That's when my brain had the power to fall in love with another obsession.

Surgery, hospitals and changing the way doctors operate since 1939.

Now, this one, I have set the obsession bar a little bit higher.

Because one thing is to accomplish something that depends on you, or to acquire the accolades and curriculum that make you an attractive hire for a big, relevant organisation.

Another thing is to change the status quo.

To change the way a whole industry, one of the biggest yet most outdated industries in the world today, behaves.

To change the way they think.

And, for once, to improve the way patients everywhere are taken care of and the way surgeons everywhere operate.

My vision for CLARO Surgical is to bring to the operating room the platform that allows doctors to operate on patients without X-rays, or with as few X-rays as possible, with as high a success rate as possible, thanks to the power of technology.

Not as a medical device for one procedure, but a platform that really changes the status quo.

And for that, I will not lose this obsession, as I have not since the day I started and will not for as many years as it takes, until I see this technology being used across hundreds of hospitals.

That is the way I am thinking about these things as I reflect on my own nature, the nature of being obsessed, and how it is, I believe, the ultimate requirement for any founder, entrepreneur or any prospective highly successful individual who will accept nothing but greatness.

In case I do get some mental bandwidth in the next 20 years outside of CLARO, I do have an idea of something I would like to pursue.

But that's a story for another day.