This presentation examines the process of surgical education. We take intelligent, gifted and diligent young people and through inculcation, create professionals we call surgeons. How does this happen? What happens to these people through that process? How can it go wrong? How can we safeguard these precious assets for a lifetime of work? We look to create mastery of skills, and the methodology to achieve that is discussed. The presenter then discusses stresses that occur during the process of education - how they occur, what the physiologic effects are in the short term and how we should recognise and manage them. Failure to do this creates repeated brain injury, which we term 'burnout' resulting in a degradation of the person being trained. How do we avoid this with our methods of training, care of the trainee and creation of the best trained surgeon we can achieve. The neuropsychology of stress and the importance of allostatic load management is discussed. How can we identify it, recognise it in ourselves and our trainees, avoid it and remediate it. These are critically important issues from an individual and health community perspective. If we do not identify and manage these issues, we will be creating lifelong damage to an individual, risk to patient care and loss of financial investment incurred through mal-training.