"Thank you, Dr. Russo, for that lovely intro, and especially for your incredible work this year.

Good evening, everyone. Let me say first what an honor it is to be in front of all of you tonight, and how humbled I am to be the next president of this great organization.

I want to start by talking about two women I love, and some mistakes they have made.

Abby Wambach is one of the greatest soccer players of all time (and my personal favorite); she’s arguably the greatest American soccer player ever. She has been looked up to by scores of women and girls. However, in 2016 she got a DUI, letting down everyone who admired her; she now speaks candidly about that moment as a turning point in her life, when she made an intentional decision to “make that moment into the best thing that ever happened to [her], a start to a better life.”

Michelle Obama, another woman I love, is known for promoting healthful eating. As first lady, she championed the importance of nutrition for children. But in her autobiography, Becoming, she talks about being chastised by her pediatrician for her girls’ unhealthful eating habits; this was humiliating for her, but since that time she has learned and grown into the health advocate that we know her as today.

Both of these women took tremendous risks in admitting and talking about these things—both of these women have been relentlessly scrutinized and criticized, often for who they were rather than what they do. But, in making these admissions, they show us what it takes to truly know yourself, and how to learn and get better. I think there is an important lesson for all of us in that.

I’m going to make a judgement here and guess that many of us got here by some degree of perfectionism—in school, in sports. It’s hard to get to be a doctor—much less, an orthopaedic surgeon—without doing well in school, and that alone is usually not enough. As we see now it often takes an exceptional, maybe even unblemished, record to get to where we all are—and it can be very hard to let go of those tendencies. But once we get here, to the real world of medicine and surgery, things are vastly more complicated and unpredictable, and it’s impossible to be perfect—and I want to talk about what we do when things don’t go the way we planned.