Avicenna - Teenage Physician / Dorm Room Philosopher
Avicenna (980-1037) might have been the greatest thinker of the Islamic Golden Age.
His full name in Arabic is Abu Ali al-Hussein ibn Abd Allah ibn Sinna, which is a mouthful in any language, so he’s usually just called Ibn Sinna in the East and Avicenna in the West. He was a prolific writer; 240 of his works survive, and he might have written twice that number in his lifetime.
Born in the far north of Persia in what is now Uzbekistan, when he was just 10 years old he was recognized as a hafiz, meaning he had memorized the entire Quran. By age 13, he began to study medicine, and quickly became a recognized expert.
When the sultan of Bukhara got sick and his court physicians couldn’t figure out what to do, they called in the adolescent Avicenna to help. 1,000 years before social media was invented, he was a teenage influencer.
After rolling his eyes and letting out a big sigh, the prodigy slouched off the couch, stomped over to the bedside of the sultan, and promptly cured him. For this feat he was given access to the royal library with a huge wealth of philosophical and scientific learning, which was just exactly the reward he wanted. If you give a book as a gift to your teenage nephew or niece, you should not hope that they are as excited about it as Avicenna was.
By age 16 he started to dive deep into the study of philosophy. He loved philosophy, particularly Aristotle, and tried to fuse Islamic theology with Aristotle’s metaphysics. Building on Aristotle, he distinguished between essence (the idea of something) and existence (the thing itself.)
His “floating man” theory posits that there is a consciousness or soul independent of the body. It’s heady stuff. Right now, somewhere in the world, in a dimly-lit dorm room, a college freshman is holding court among their peers, spouting a half-understood version of Avicenna’s ideas.
Philosophy might have been Avicenna’s passion, but it was medicine that paid the bills. Avicenna built on the medical writings of the ancient Greek physicians Galen and Hippocrates (pictured above), adding his own commentary on their early medical theories.
He helped to preserve and expand the ancient medical theory of the four humors - blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile - to include the four temperaments associated with the four humors, specific organs, and bodily fluids.
Avicenna wrote The Book of Healing and The Canon of Medicine, which became the foundational texts of the medical schools of the medieval world. They spread west through Muslim North Africa and Spain first, and then jumped the sea to Salerno, Italy, the home of the first real medical school in Western Europe.
Translated into Latin, these teachings on treatments, medicines, and even surgery would dominate medical learning for the next 700+ years. Get ready for your bleeding, purging, and leeches… oh my!
If you’ve got a bit of gray hair going, it can be hard to work for a leader who still gets asked for ID by the bartender. Especially if you describe yourself as a “seasoned professional” in your online profile, it can be difficult to take orders from someone who is many years (or even a couple of decades) younger than you are.
The best thing to do is to ask yourself: is this about you or them? Why are you hung up about working for a younger boss? Do you think they’re not ready? Do you think it should be you in the driver’s seat instead of them? If it’s just a matter of time in the seat, sure, you have more experience, but do you really want to be where they are? Is that what causes the resentment?
If so, don’t take it out on them. Someone else put the youngin in that seat. Yes, they were chosen over you, but that doesn’t mean they were the wrong choice. If you don’t even want to be in the seat, then why does it bother you that they are there? Lean in to help. When you start from a place of collaboration, they’ll probably be glad to benefit from the wisdom of your experience.
It helps to step back and get some perspective on this new boss as a person. Maybe they really are a super genius. If they are the real deal and the company goes from zero to billions, you’ll get to ride the ride too. While you’re not the hero of the story, you'll have fantastic stories to tell on your yacht one day. It might not be as big a yacht as your young boss has, but it’s still a yacht, and that ain’t bad.
Or maybe they’re a dud. If they’ve been promoted up (or even hired into) an established corporate hierarchy, there’s probably a good reason for it. Many, many people have weighed in on this decision. But if this person has limited experience but somehow is CEO of a newly established company, check and see if there’s only one investor, and that person changed the CEO’s diapers 20-something years ago, then, yeah, maybe it’s time to run.
Age discrimination can run both ways. Judge a person based on what they can do for the company, not by how many trips around the sun they’ve had or what they look like. But if a teenager approaches your hospital bed with a scalpel, maybe check with the rest of the team to make sure they’re really a doctor and not just a dorm room philosopher.
