I was never born to write. I was taught to write. And I am still being taught to write.
Interpretation
Writing is a learned skill, and one continues to grow and improve through education and practice.
This quote by Atul Gawande emphasizes the idea that the ability to write is not an innate talent but rather a skill that is developed through learning and continuous improvement. It highlights the importance of education and the ongoing journey of mastering any craft, including writing, suggesting that even accomplished writers are still in a process of learning and refinement.
In practice
In a writing workshop, I reminded my students that 'I was never born to write' to encourage them to embrace their learning process.
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.
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.
Just using a checklist requires [doctors] to embrace different values from ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork.
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.
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.
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.
I think of it often and imagine the scene clearly. Even if they come to kill me, I will tell them what they are trying to do is wrong, that education is our basic right.
What we want... is for students to get more interested in things, more involved in them, more engaged in wanting to know; to have projects that they can get excited about and work on over long periods of time, to be stimulated to find things out on their own.
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Books are slow, books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud.
The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.
We need to be creative with young people. If they have no opportunities, they will get into drugs and be vulnerable to suicide.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.