SCROLLING through Netflix one night a couple of months ago, my kids came across a movie called "Gifted Hands." It was described as the story of a pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and we decided to give it a whirl.

It was absolutely riveting, the extraordinary story of a ghetto kid from Detroit who became a world-renowned pediatric neurosurgeon.

How does that happen? Try calculating the odds of an inner-city kid from a broken home in the 1960s growing up to become a pioneer in pediatric neurosurgery: The deck was stacked against Benjamin Carson's success in life save two important things: the love of God and the love of his mother.

As a youngster, Carson was at the bottom of his class and his classmates reminded him of that on a fairly regular basis. He thought he was stupid, too, and as self-fulfilling prophecies go, his behavior indicated no confidence in himself.

His mother knew better. She continually encouraged him to do his best. As it turned out, he needed glasses; once he could see properly, his grades improved. Sonya Carson made Ben and his brother, Curtis, memorize the times tables. Naturally, Ben didn't relish the idea and tried to talk his mother out of it. Good mother that she was, she told him he wouldn't be playing outside until he'd learned them. That was motivation enough and he rose to the occasion. Carson writes in his book "Gifted Hands": "No one was calling me dummy in math anymore."

MOM WAS SMART, TOO

But doing well in math wasn't good enough for his mother. She wanted him to do his best in all his subjects. She decided the boys were watching too much television. Snap! Off went the television one night in the middle of a program. They would be allowed two or three programs a week and would read two books a week, submitted to her with a written book report. Carson wrote that, as boys, they weren't happy about it, but they were good kids and loved and respected their mother, and followed the family rules that she set.