Eric

“Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.”
― Ted Chiang, The Best of Subterranean

“[The directors] were proud, sensible business people who realized that their reputations were at stake and that, while they were a jury for the moment, they in turn would be judged.”
― Lawrence Lederman, Tombstones: A Lawyer's Tales from the Takeover Decades

“The M & M sees avoiding error as largely a matter of will—of staying sufficiently informed and alert to anticipate the myriad ways that things can go wrong and then trying to head off each potential problem before it happens. It isn't damnable that an error occurs, but there is some shame to it. In fact, the M & M's ethos can seem paradoxical. On the one hand, it reinforces the very American idea that error is intolerable. On the other hand, the very existence of the M & M, its place on the weekly schedule, amounts to an acknowledgement that mistakes are an inevitable part of medicine.”
― Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

“My third answer for becoming a positive deviant: Count something. Regardless of what one ultimately does in medicine—or outside medicine, for that matter—one should be a scientist in the world....If you count something you find interesting, you will learn something interesting.”
― Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance