Episode #36 | Dr. Matt Asciutto

Do you work in the animal health industry or veterinary profession? Have you ever wondered how people began their careers and how they got to where they are today?

Hi everyone. I’m Stacy Pursell, the founder and CEO of The Vet Recruiter, the leading executive search and recruiting firm for the animal health industry and veterinary profession. I was the first recruiter to specialize in the animal health industry and veterinary profession in the United States, and built the first search firm to serve this unique niche. For the past 25 plus years, I have built relationships with the industry’s top leaders and trailblazers. The people of Animal Health podcast highlights the incredible individuals I have connected with throughout my career. You will be able to learn more about their lives, careers and contributions. With our wide range of expert guest, you will be sure to learn something new in every episode. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the episode.

Welcome to The People of Animal Health podcast. On today’s show, we are talking with Dr. Matt Asciutto. Dr. Asciutto is a dynamic professional who skillfully blends his roles as a veterinarian, podcaster, musician, improviser, educator and father. Throughout his career, he has woven together the rigorous demands of science, medicine, music and comedy, creating a uniquely enriching professional life. Dr. Asciutto brings an invigorating and positive outlook to the challenging field of veterinary medicine.

Before embarking on his veterinary career, Dr. Asciutto honed his performance skills as a professional improv comedian for seven years and earned a master’s in chemistry. He graduated from the University of Tennessee’s College of Veterinary Medicine in 2017 and has since become a full-time emergency relief veterinarian. In this role, he provides crucial support to more than 35 hospitals across six states, showcasing his adaptability and dedication to animal care. In his free time, Dr. Asciutto channels his creativity into writing humorous songs for friends and working on his forthcoming book about his experiences as a relief veterinarian. And I can’t wait to read that. He also dedicates time to his podcast, The Greatest Profession, where he shares insights and stories from his veterinary journey.

Welcome onto The People of Animal Health podcast. And how are you, Matt?

I’m doing okay. I’m doing all right. When it’s read back to me, that sounds pretty impressive. It’s not that impressive. It’s just a lot of life that has happened. Wow.

Well, so Matt, you and I met last August in Kansas City, during the Veterinary Innovation Summit, when four of us podcasters got together to talk about doing podcasts in the veterinary space, and then we actually did a live podcast together about doing a podcast, and that was a lot of fun. So I’m excited to have you on my show today, and I look forward to being on your show soon as well. Now, Matt, you have had an interesting career so far with some interesting twists and turns, but I’d like to start off at the bottom, in the very beginning of your career. What was your life like growing up and where did you grow up?

First off, thank you for having me. I also, I’ve been looking forward to this conversation as well, and many more to come. My life growing up, I mean, I grew up in California. I was born in Michigan, but I left when I was super young, moved to LA where, honestly, I went to a different school every year, elementary school every year, and then moved to San Diego when I was eight. So when I think about growing up, I think about growing up in San Diego, but a lot of my early life, as I was thinking about it is, it was just me. I mean, my mom worked a ton. My mom and dad separated when I was five, and because I changed school so often, it was just like I would hang out in the house or on the bus or whatever and just entertained myself, which as I’m talking about it is like a theme to my life. But, mostly when I think about it, San Diego, growing up in Southern California, I went to college out there. I thought I would be a neuroscientist, not a veterinarian. So that’s me.

Well, so when I heard you say that, just the word adaptability comes to mind, and I’m sure that ties into the conversation on improv that we’ll talk about later, but so neuroscience, so that was something early on you were thinking about. So when did you first figure out what you wanted to do professionally?

I mean, I still don’t know what I want to do professionally. I’m 38, I’m well entrenched into this career, but I’m like, I don’t know. What am I doing? What do I want to be when I grow up? When I was a kid, it was neuroscience in large part because my mom was a speech pathologist. She worked a lot with brain injury patients and stroke patients. And so I just became really fascinated with how the brain worked. And so all, I mean, really up until I was 22, 23, I just assumed that that’s what I would be doing. And it was really interesting to me. But it wasn’t until, gosh, late twenties that I actually, I followed a girl. The girl that I was with at the time was like, “I want to be a veterinarian,” and got into vet school. I’m like, “That sounds right. Let’s do it.” So I applied the following year and that’s how I ended up here.

Well, I would love to learn more about the beginning of your veterinary career. So after you applied to vet school, how did you get started in your career in veterinary medicine or after graduating?

So my background is education and theater, and I did a lot of teaching. I love the hard sciences. I just assumed that I would be going into pharmaceutical research or education. And so when I was April of 2017, which is the year that I graduated, I thought that I was not going to be going into practice. And then, I’m like, “Well, it would be nice to know something about clinical practice before I go off and do these other things. So let me go ahead and get a job.” And I figured I could get as much experience as possible if I did something like ER rather than GP because I just want to concentrate as many different things as possible within a short period of time.

But I’m still doing this. My goal was to never do it. And then my goal was, well, I’ll do it for a year. And then I was doing a teaching fellowship during that first year, and that relationship that I was talking about was falling apart during that time. And so I just wasn’t really able to focus on what was the next step. And I’m like, “Well, let just continue doing this whole ER vet thing, ‘cos it’s the only thing I know how to do in vet med, but I’m not happy with this job, so let me try this relief thing. Let me see if I can do a gig type of situation.” And I just started calling around clinics and knocking on doors and visiting the booths at Ivex and things like that. And that started off my “career”, but it’s like that was never on purpose. It was like a stalling tactic until I figured out what that thing was. And here I am, what, six years, seven years later, I’m still, ah, seven years later, still doing it.

Well, when did you feel like you were beginning to gain traction with your career?

I don’t know. 2021, I think. I mean several years into it is when I finally felt like, oh, I guess this is what I’m doing, and it’s going pretty well all of 2017. I mean, that whole first year is just you figuring it out. And then I was on the road and there was, I was a relative new grad and you’re entrusting me with your hospital, especially these overnight shifts at specialty ERs. I’m like, “Why are you trusting me with this?” And so there was this huge piece of, this thought of no one’s going to offer me shifts again once they find out that I’m not good at what I’m doing. And so I would just keep accepting shifts at every hospital possible, just knowing that one day the jig was going to be up. And it just never was, right? The captain fighting me back. They kept giving me the gigs, I kept doing all this work. I was overextending myself. And then it wasn’t really until mid to late 2021 that I’m like, “I guess this is what I’m doing and I’m decent at it, at least to the point that people are asking me to come back and I can make a living at it.” So, four years in.

Well, that’s fascinating. So during all that time, what’s been the most surprising thing to you up to this point during your career, in the veterinary profession?

That I can do it at all, is surprising. I mean, truly, even today, I’ll go into shifts and there’ll be these long strings of shifts. And again, right now I work primarily at specialty referral centers as the ER doctor. And I’ll finish these string of shifts and I’ll be like, “Man, I’m so lucky that the case didn’t come in that showed me for the fraud that I am. I guess it’s to say that we all wrestle with this constantly. It’s that whole imposter syndrome and all that. But yeah, even now it is surprising that I guess I know what I’m doing. That all of the bit of trying to work really hard to make sure that I was a good doctor to take over the hospital and that I was being a responsible guardian of these hospitals has led me to, I guess this skill set of being able to do not only ER work, but also to be able to foster and build new relationships with new hospitals and client, I guess I’m a veterinarian. The most surprising thing is that I’m an active veterinarian.

And I don’t know if that imposter syndrome ever goes away. I experienced that, too, and one of my mentors is another executive search consultant, and he works in the technology space and he’s placed some pretty high profile roles. At one point, he placed the CEO position at Hewlett Packard, and he placed the first female Board of Director member for Apple, and he’s been doing executive search for something like 40 plus years. And he said, “I still have imposter syndrome. And I talk to executives at Fortune 500 companies all day long, and every day I wonder why they want to talk to me.” So I think everybody that’s successful struggles with that, and I don’t know if that ever completely goes away.

No, and it’s almost like a gift in a way, right? Because you try to, as long as you don’t then take that information and start going down the path of, well, I guess I’m a worthless person. It gives you information of, you know that you’re trying to be good, right? You want to be good at the thing that you’re doing, which even just that desire itself is important. If you got to the point where you said, you know what, I’m good enough, and you clock in and clock out, that’s a level of apathy that you just don’t want to carry in your life and probably doesn’t make for a great veterinarian. So it is good to extent, I think that it is healthy, but also, as long as, like I said, you don’t go down that road of, well, I guess I’m just going to quit all of this because I’ll never be good enough. That type of thing.

Probably keeps you on your toes and keeps you humble, too.

Definitely. Definitely.

Well, how have you seen the veterinary profession change during the time that you’ve been involved?

It’s hard to say because, I mean, we’ve all seen that big shift in the COVID era, right? And I didn’t really have a baseline before this. I had no veterinary experience before I went to vet school, right? I didn’t have anything in that part of the application. I went in on academic merit alone, which means that all I know is that, hey, new grad world of what the heck are we doing? And then the, I guess I’m doing this whole freelance business thing of what the heck am I doing? And then COVID and what are any of us doing?

I will say that what I think is I’ve seen a lot of is like a boundary setting. So even just in the pre-COVID times and then the post-COVID times, I think beforehand there was this idea of, yes, we can do anything. It doesn’t matter the cost on the business and the people within the business, whereas the strains of the COVID years have changed it so that we are more cognizant of the cost. So we’ll still say yes, but we also draw boundaries. We say yes to a point, then we say, you know what? We just can’t see anymore. I got to protect my people. And I think that’s one of the biggest shifts that I’ve seen in the profession.

Yeah, I would agree. I’ve seen that, too. Well, everybody throughout their career has high points and low points. What’s been the biggest high and also the lowest low that you’ve experienced in your career up to now?

I think that the, starting the opposite, so the lowest low, which maybe doesn’t make sense, is that I was super busy throughout, so maybe 2020, maybe 2022 into like 2021. Because I was working so hard and saying yes to so many different shifts that my life was working such that when I got, it was January 2020, I’m like, I got to take some time off. So I took off two months and then COVID happened, and then as a traveling vet who goes to other states gigs, just for that period of time, they dried up. So there was this period of time where it’s like I’m looking at, I’m like, I have no money left. I don’t have a contingency plan. I don’t know what to do. And so that was the beginning of it where I just remember distinctly laying on a bed at the back of the one hospital that would hire me during that time, in that short period in March of 2020, and thinking, I’m just looking at my account balances and thinking, I don’t know how I’m going to make this work.

1I will say that for the next year. And it was just a constant, it’s like saying yes to whatever out of fear. And that meant that I was working 25 shifts a month, and these are ER shifts that are long anyway, traveling between multiple states. So I would leave a night shift in Maryland, and then I would drive to North Carolina, which is like six hours. I would nap in a parking lot and then would show up for the next shift. And I was burning myself out, and I got to the point then where it was like, I don’t know what to do. I feel trapped in this almost. So about that year, I would say, it was probably the darkest part, the hardest part.

What did you learn from that experience?

I learned, which then brings me to the highest part, which is that I learned about two things. So one is boundary setting, saying no, especially as a relief doctor, it’s so hard to say no. You feel responsible to these people. You form relationships. And so if you’re not taking the shift, someone that and care about has to be overworked, right? But I think that taking care of yourself and saying no means that you’re also taking care of the people in your life. So that was the biggest piece. And then the piece of it really is just that defined, “Hey, I’m going to do X number of shifts and that’s my limit,” and plan it out to be exactly that amount, really let me create that boundary.

The other thing that I learned is that distance from hospitals makes that easier. So we were living in the beach in North Carolina during COVID because why not? And I found that it was easier for me to say no to extra shifts in Maryland because it was a seven-hour drive. Whereas when I was a living in Raleigh with the hospitals down the street, it’s like, “Ah, I could pick it up, why not?” So then the highest highs have actually been since I moved to Colorado, being able to work across the country, and now I have this actual balance of when I’m working, I’m working, but when I’m home, I’m home and there is no bleeding in between.

How does that feel to be at that point now?

Great. It feels fantastic. I mean, of course, I still feel bad sometimes with these hospitals. I mean, we’re talking about relationships that I’ve had for seven years, right? But they’re across the country and I have a son now, and it’s like I got other things that I need to do, and it’s not just as easy as picking up a last minute shift. There’s real repercussions. So just living in that world of, I guess I’ve set a boundary and I’m not crossing it, that has been really nice. It allows for me then to say yes to things within confines, enjoy the time that I actually have at home, feels much better.

How old is your son now?

He is one, one year.

That’s a fun age. So what kinds of things is he doing at the age of one?

He is a lot of pointing. I want to go over there. Can you show me this cabinet? He does a lot of screeching. He loves, if you give him both of your fingers, he will grasp onto them and then he will sprint. He doesn’t want to do it by himself just yet. He may take a couple of steps, but man, oh man, he is busy. He is busy, busy, busy, even though he doesn’t have the physical capacity for it. That’s been really cool.

That is fun. Well, I know you have a lot of things going on right now in your life. You talked about the book. I know you’re starting a new business, so I’d love for you to share with our listeners about all of the different projects that you’re up to these days.

Gosh. Do we have enough time? I have tried to whittle it down a little bit. So I would say the big thing that is taking up most of my time is starting a brick and mortar business. It is far from guaranteed, although I feel like it’s guaranteed. But the idea is that I’ve been to all these different places, all these different ERs around the country, and like we all do. We say, “ah, I could do it better.” Or this is an idea that it’s like we have these ideas of things that could be more ideal, and then we rail against the powers that be. And then I’m like, “Well, if I have all of these ideas, I can either sit here and talk about them for years, or I can just do something about it and show that maybe I’m an idiot, right?” Maybe I’m wrong with what my thoughts are, but maybe I’m right, too. And any idea that we have, if we think that it’s worth doing, we should just do it.

So that’s what I’m doing a lot of, and it’s been quite the learning experience. I’ve been doing this for the past, I guess, four months now, trying to build this? And we’re just right there, almost at the end, but it takes up a lot of time.

In terms of other than that, it’s what? I have the podcast, The Greatest Profession. I have some music that I’m still trying to work on. That’s the piece that gets always pushed into the back. So I’m just trying every day to chip away at something. The book is in the, “Hey, we have to just do the final edit,” and then get it to the publishers. And then, let’s see. I mean, being a father, right? That’s what I am trying to do is when I’m home, when he’s in daycare, great, he’s in daycare. I can do all this stuff. I can have meetings with architects, I can talk about materials, boards and whatever. But when he’s back and right? When Lindsay and Luca come home, it’s like, “All right, I’m done. We’re focusing on family stuff.” So those are the main things. I guess.

What gave you the inspiration to write the book and also to start the podcast?

Okay. The podcast started because it would actually, in a COVID timeframe where you’re sitting in rounds, you’re talking to all these other doctors, and we don’t know what to do and we don’t know how we’re doing, right? So we’re actually talking to each other about how are you surviving during this time? How’s your life? How are you? And it ended up, for me, it’s always been about the people who are doing this, right? And that was the idea. It’s like the human being behind the professional facade and those conversations, I thought, man, it would just be so wonderful for other people to hear these things. And then that just morphed into a podcast over time.

So the idea is like, “Hey, this is our story. This is what we’re thinking. These are the qualms that we have. These are the joys that we have.” And so other people can say, “Hey, look, it’s not just me, right?” Or if they do have something that they’re struggling with, maybe somebody has done the same thing and have some wisdoms on it. So that was the podcast, which has been super fun. And I do think that, so it’s called The Greatest Profession. At the time, I thought it’s like, “Is it? Is it the greatest profession?” But as I’ve been doing it, I think that there’s a real positivity about the profession that I constantly hear back from the guests, and it has made me more optimistic overall, and I’m like, “Dang, maybe it is the greatest profession.”

Well, I said that I met you in Kansas City, but now that I think about it, we actually met before that. We met at one at the conferences because you had a booth set up and you had a booth set up for your podcast. And I walked by and we spoke, and we talked about me being on your podcast, and I think we talked about you being on my podcast at that time, too. So I had forgotten about that. Well, the book, first of all, how did you have time to write the book with everything else that you’ve been doing?

So the book, I mean, in terms of the time, honestly, it was about making it. It was before, because the draft has been done, I mean, gosh, about a year, maybe a little more now. I mean, I finished the first draft probably about a year and a half ago, if I’m really thinking about the timeline, and then it’s going through and then draft two and then draft three. At that time, I didn’t have the business, thank goodness. I didn’t have this hospital thing that I was trying to build, but it ended up being an exercise in making the time to do it. So the whole idea there was, I felt even before Luca was born, that this was the end of this period for me. I think that relief has an end date for everybody. Just like ER, we don’t know what that is. Some people, it’s like 30 years. Some people it’s two years. And I felt like for me, I had gained what I needed to gain out of it. I had contributed what I needed to contribute into it, and it was time for something else.

And so the book ends up being a memoir of the period of my life that was, this on the road thing. I mean, it’s a mix of a memoir and an instruction manual about how to basically do relief medicine, but also how to start your own freelance business. So that was the insipidus for it. But I was also, I mean at that time I’m like, I need to do this. I have so many ideas that just come out as ideas, and they just sit and they linger and they circulate. I’m like, I just need to force myself to do it. So every day, during the week, it would be as soon as everyone left the house, 9:00 AM until 2000 words later, whatever time that was, I was just going to sit and write. And it was about forcing myself to take the time to do it, which I think was a really valuable thing that I learned during that process as well.

What advice would you have for someone else who wanted to write a book?

It’s time. I mean, truly, it’s about the process and the dedication of time. So I’ve tried these things in the past. I wrote a rock opera. I’ve written God knows how many sketches, songs in general, albums, other fictional or non-fictional works, and it all ends up being the amount of time that you put in … I felt like I was just doing stops and starts before. With the rock opera, I was like, I’m just going to sit down and I’m going to do the thing. What I found with all the other projects is that they go away if you stop working on them, and if you don’t force yourself through the periods where it doesn’t feel like the words are coming to you, that the ideas just feel stale, you’re never going to get to the other side of it. And so truly, for those of you who are thinking about working on really any project, but especially a writing one, sitting down, closing the door, turning off everything and having a specific time to allocate towards it, that’s the only way that it’s going to get done.

Well, I know you’re a musician. You talked about the rock opera. If somebody wanted to listen to your music, where would they go to find it?

You’re going to have to search. It’s always funny when I go to a new hospital, they look it up and then they find all these little YouTube videos that I just didn’t know existed. We found a Facebook page for the Rock opera. I’m like, how? I didn’t know that there was one. So you’re going to have to search for it. I will say that as a part of the things that are happening in the near future, I will create a Spotify presence. I haven’t because of fear, right? It’s those things that are close to us that we don’t want to necessarily put out into the world. But I’m like, what am I doing? I don’t want to die having held these things to my chest, right? So there will be, at some point you’ll find it on Spotify and Apple Music, but right now you got to dig. Good luck.

So I have an acronym for fear. It’s False Evidence Appearing Real.

That is about right. You sit and you say, “Hey, that thing … You take the smallest little fraction of what something might be and be like, “Oh, yeah, there’s evidence as to why it’s [inaudible 00:26:54] I’m terrible, and I should never have done this in the first place.”

Well, you’ve done improv. I would think that would probably cause me some fear. How did you get into improv? I’d love to know more about that.

That was something out of, so apparently when I think back on it, when I was a kid, I was already doing it. We all do it as kids. It’s just play. It’s play with the circumstances that you have. When it became formalized is when I was in high school. I had friends who forced me. They carried me to improv practice, so they had a high school club. It was run by a professional team, the one that I ultimately got a job with after high school, and they made me go. They thought I was funny, and I’m like, I’m not funny. I don’t know what you want from me. And so at some point it was honestly, it was just to be less embarrassed, like, stop carrying me. I’ll go myself. And so we kept doing it in high school, and then it was just one of those things where, I don’t know, my transition to college wasn’t great.

I didn’t enjoy my college experience, and I just needed something to connect me back to the person that I was, and improv was that thing. So I auditioned for the local professional team. To my surprise, I got on, and then I spent a couple of years being not great, right? Hugging the back wall, making weird choices, and then it’s just about time, and after a little while you get better and you are in more shows, and then now you’re teaching. And so then it’s just one of those, it grows, and by the time you leave, you’re like, “Oh, I guess I’m one of the veterans.” It’s so wild.

That sounds like an idea for a veterinary conference to have, because there’s always musicians and different events going on, should have an improv night and let people get up there and do that.

It is the single most useful skill set that I have in my entire life, right? It is why I’m able to succeed as a relief vet. It’s why I’m able to think about all these different projects and be like, “Sure, I guess this is what we’re doing now.” So yes, absolutely. Any conference that wants to bring me in to start doing some improv stuff like, I’m in, I think it is the most valuable thing that we could do.

All right, let’s do it. Okay. Listeners, if you’re planning a conference, consider Matt for improv night, to kick that off. Well, Matt, what does your crystal ball say about the future of the veterinary profession?

I think it’s a lot of niche business. I’ve been thinking about this a lot because of the thing that I’m trying to start, and I know that a big piece of it is, man, VC is going to take over. And then corporate, what’s the corporate influence on the sphere? The way that I see it is that we, veterinarians are an adaptable bunch, and we are creative, even though we don’t necessarily think that we are. It’s a lot of people who are like, “I could make that work.” And that is the space that I think that we’re going to work.

Moving forward, I think, it’s going to be a lot of people who want to make their mark in this industry by doing something that’s unique and different and niche, something that corporate and VC could never replicate or compete against. And that’s how I think that it’s going to move forward. I mean, in my mind, it’s going to be kind of cool. You have whatever the big structures are doing, the big structure thing, and then you have all these little off shoot need rogue individuals who are doing their own thing, and then together we create this odd spectrum of veterinary medicine care, which I love.

And I think what you’re saying is there’s tremendous opportunity in all kinds of areas and niches within the profession. Well, what are some of the habits that you believe have allowed you to achieve success up to this point in your career?

I think that when, I have a habit of saying yes, and maybe this is a improv thing, but my thing is when somebody says something to me, my first reaction is like, “Okay, cool. How is that true? Or how do we make that work?” As opposed to, “No, that’s not going to work, because …” So, for example, when I’m talking about the relief stuff, my thought was why would anybody hire me, a relative new grad to watch over their specialty hospital? But the actual visceral response was like, “Okay, I can make that work.” It’s like, “Yes and …” right? It’s like, “Okay, you’re asking me to do this thing. Sure, and this is how it works.” It works if I draw in my own skills to try to bring as much value as possible, be really nice to the staff and the clients and try to make things work and be as cognizant about my medicine as possible and be responsible, blah, blah, blah.

So I guess it’s a habit of just saying, “Cool. Yes.” And seeing the opportunity and saying, “Okay, how do we make this work?” That has, I think, been probably the biggest thing for me. There’s small things, like when I go through, when I’m in productive phases, I have to carve out time. I have to have, all right, I’m going to work on this during this period, otherwise I float off into infinity. But those things come and go. If I’m not really careful on it, I have a hard time with it. But that first thing, that saying yes, I feel like that that’s probably what drives everything else.

That makes sense. What mentor has made the biggest impact on your career so far?

I don’t know. I don’t have traditional, again, my role in this thing has been kind of rogue. I entered without knowing what I was getting myself into. I had a job briefly, but then tried to leave basically as quickly as possible, and then I’ve just been off and doing my own thing. It wasn’t really until recently that I’ve gathered a set of mentors and when it comes to starting this business, it’s more about the philosophy piece. So Josh Weissman from Flourish Veterinary Consultants, and then also Aaron Massecar, who I don’t know from everything, including NAVSEA and all that. Those are guys that I’ll just sit down with and have philosophical discussions that they’ll either give me permission to do the things, they’ll stop my negative train thoughts, the ones that are like, why would this work? And whatever, those things. And they’ve given me a lot of really interesting feedback. So those are the guys. But, I don’t know. I’ve just gone rogue.

Well, I like that. You’re paving a new path. Well, what advice would you give the younger version of yourself

Process. Process is important. So when I was a kid, I was one of these people who, it’s like, everyone’s like, “Oh, he’s so whatever. He’s smart and he’s creative and he has all this potential and blah, blah, blah,” which when I was a kid, it’s nice to hear, but also it’s really, it’s almost limiting because then what I want to do is never disrupt the potential idea. I don’t want to take your expectations and show you that you’re wrong because I’m actually a moron or not good at this. So I avoided doing a lot of things, right? I never studied for classes. I never really practiced music. I never took lessons. All of these things that basically said, if I engage with this activity, I can show you that you’re not right, that your belief in me is unfounded. That took a long time to break, and I think that it wasn’t until, man, my mid-thirties, maybe my early thirties, when I realized actually it doesn’t matter.

Maybe that school, maybe that’s what the summer point, but it’s like, do the thing. Just do the thing. By actually engaging in the activity, you are going to get a lot further than some vague potential. And yeah, okay, maybe you’re going to not reach the potential that somebody thinks of you, but you’re going to reach something, you’re going to do something, you’re going to show yourself where you are, and there’s a lot of freedom in that. So do the work. Even if it means that you might be disappointing. Some people do the work because that’s the only way you’re going to get anywhere.

I like that. Do the thing.

Do it. Yeah.

What message or principle do you wish you could teach everyone?

Saying yes, truly. I think that that is something, most of the time, I do see this a lot where someone says, “Hey, why don’t you try this?” And then someone else says, “Oh, that’ll never work, because …” Right? And that is a, they’re right. I mean, the thing about saying no to something like that and to a possibility is that you prove yourself right then by not doing it or not engaging in it, right? If I say no because of these reasons and then I never tried the thing, well, then it didn’t work. But I think that if we can flip that script a little bit and say yes and seeing the potential and trying for stuff, I think that we end up surprising ourselves. When I was teaching MCAT Prep in vet school, one of the things that I tried to do really, really hard is that when people would say an answer to a physics question, they would not always be right.

It turns out physics can be hard, but there was something, there was always something about what they said that is correct, right? And maybe it was an assumption that they made. Maybe it was they did this part of the math, right? It’s like if you just focus on, okay, that part is right now, we can adjust the other bits to then make the whole answer. That sets up in a totally different perspective. The student doesn’t shut down anymore. We actually get to a better answer and all that kind of stuff. So finding a way to say yes is actually really, it ends up being really wise and it puts you in a better position to grow as opposed to saying no, in which case you’re never going to grow.

Yeah. Well, it’s more positive than No.

It really is. And I’m not saying don’t set boundaries and that type of thing. That’s later. You don’t have to actually do the thing. But if it’s like you tell me, “Hey, you should start a canoe company.” My first thought should not be, “No, I don’t know anything about wood or canoe, or rivers or lakes.” My first thought is like, okay, well what about that is a good idea? Why do I, it’s like, man, I really love curves and I really do wood grain. And then I could be like, nah, I don’t have the time for that right now. That’s not really in the scope of what I want to do in my life. I don’t have to do it, but it’s like by switching and saying, yes, it really does allow for this kind of cool, interesting, positive potential.

Opens up the doors for possibilities.

It does.

I like that. Well, some of our guests have mentioned that they have a key book that they’ve read that helped them. Is there a key book in your life that’s impacted you?

I would definitely say early on, there were two. One was V.S. Ramachandran’s, Phantom of the Brain. Phantoms of the Brain. And then the other one would be Oliver Sacks the Man Mistook His Wife for a Hat. They were really cool. For me, I was like, it was, again, neuroscience stuff. It was just really fun case things that are just these odd anomalies of like, “Oh, hey, we knocked out the link between the fusiform gyrus and the whatever, limbic system somehow, and now we can’t see faces.” And it was just so interesting that that’s how the brain worked. It’s so delicate. So those were definitely pretty influential in my growing up.

And then as an adult, the two books that I think about are Delivering Happiness and Creativity, Inc. Those are both more business books. Delivering Happiness is the Zappos story, where basically they’re saying, if we are doing customer service and that is our product, then we have to make choices based off of that value. We can’t make choices that sacrifice that value, which I think that there’s a lesson there in life, right? If it’s like I’m saying that this is important to me, I can’t make choices that remove it from my life. If I say being with family is important, I can’t make choices of, I guess I’m not going to enroll in a softball league that meets three times a week from five to eight. It’s just not going to happen.

And Creativity, Inc. is a really interesting thing of we all, I think actually for veterinarians, it’s really important because it was the story of Pixar and the guy was saying, “Hey, I, my whole life wanted to make the first computer animated film, right?” And then they did Toy Story and he did it, and he accomplished his dream, and now what? Right? And it was like to that shift of how do I live the rest of my life having already accomplished the thing that I thought that I was going for? And I feel like veterinarians are in that. Our goal is to get into vet school or to become veterinarians. And once that happens, okay, well now what? And I think that a book like that really has helped with, okay, shift your ideas, shift your expectations a little bit, focus on something else. What’s your new goal? So those four.

That makes sense. You always have to have a new goal. Once you hit one goal. There’s got to be something else. Well, Matt, you’ve got the mic. What is one thing that you want to share with our listeners of The People of Animal Health podcast before you drop the mic today?

That you, first off, you’re not alone. You are inside of a human experience. That we are all a part of this continuum. No matter if it’s an author or a mechanic or pest control individual or whatever, like mathematician, we are all experiencing the same human things. And then secondly would be to give yourself permission to do things, right? To say no to things, to say yes to other things, to go out on a limb and do an open mic night or whatever. This is our life and we have the one, and what are we so afraid of? What is the worst that could happen? Just give yourself permission to live the life that you have.

Well, that’s great advice. Matt, you are very inspiring, and I appreciate you taking the time to be on The People of Animal Health podcast today.

No, thank you for having me. Really, thank you. I appreciate being here.