“Tango has two core elements: showing your intention to move forward and allowing your partner to accept the invitation to follow your lead,” he says. “It’s a beautiful combination of assertiveness, determination, and then negotiation, followed by permission to proceed, depending upon how the conversation is going during the dance.”
No Regrets
Procrastination is not a familiar word to Dr. Upegui.
“The time frame between something that I want to do and [actually] doing it is very short,” he says. “If I want to do something, I just look at how I can get to it as soon as it’s available.”
Motorcycling ranks as his number one passion. Last year, he completed a 7,000-mile trip without taking any time off from his current job, which requires him to lead, manage, and often meet with hospitalist teams nationwide. He traveled via back roads on weekends to a major city, left his bike at the airport, and then hopped on a plane to wherever he needed to be for work. Instead of flying home for the weekend, he’d return to the airport to pick up his bike and travel to the next city he wanted to visit, which could be 1,000 miles away.
“The cool thing about the road is that random people help you,” he says. “The hotels would keep my clothes and luggage, and airport parking employees would help me park my motorcycle in a safe place and keep my helmet in their office.”
Dr. Upegui says childhood experiences that focused on momentum and movement laid the foundation for his mobile and adventuresome lifestyle. Movement, variability, and change have become the guiding factors in his life. Perhaps that’s why he chose to be a hospitalist. Among the youngest fields in medicine, the specialty is always growing, changing, and evolving.
“If you take any change in life as just a new stage of a new moment and you just perform your best in this current situation, then that will allow you to always be flexible to what’s happening in front of you,” Dr. Upegui says. “I love my work, family, Apogee, and the opportunities I have had. I could die completely satisfied today, knowing that I’ve done the best I could and searched for happiness every day.”