No one teaches you how to think about money in medical school or residency. Yet, from the moment you start practicing, you must think about it. You must consider what is covered for a patient and what is not.
Atul GawandeRead
A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for it-will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?-because the difference between triumph and defeat, you'll find, isn't about willingness to take risks. It's about mastery of rescue.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Failure can be a stepping stone to success if one is willing to acknowledge mistakes and learn from them.
This quote emphasizes the idea that failure is not the end but an opportunity for growth and recovery. It suggests that the true measure of success is not just in being willing to take risks but in how one responds to setbacks, highlighting the importance of resilience and the ability to correct course when things do not go as planned.
Themes
FailureSuccessResilienceMasteryTriumph
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech to emphasize the importance of resilience after failure.
More from Atul Gawande
All quotes →Just using a checklist requires [doctors] to embrace different values from ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork.
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When I do an operation, it's half a dozen people. When it goes beautifully, it's like a symphony, with everybody playing their part.
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At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naive. But it isn't.
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We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.
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No travel ban or quarantine will seal a country completely. Even if travel could be reduced by eighty per cent-itself a feat-models predict that new transmissions would be delayed only a few weeks. Worse, it would only drive an increase in the number of cases at the source. Health-care workers who have fallen ill would not be able to get out for treatment, and the international health personnel needed to quell the outbreak would no longer be able to go in.
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