Eric

“There were two elements to look for in any draft: one was the accuracy in reflecting the deal, and the other, its omissions. The difficult part was to find out what had been left out. Frank would start with "what if" and then go through the structure of the draft and see how it worked. . . . The process of asking questions was like playing pinball. He'd run the ball through the maze and see what lit up and what didn't. He would spend ten or fifteen balls through with me, and the agreement would start to take on shape, then three dimensions and life. When its inadequacies showed, he asked the inevitable question: Could we layer on another level of complexity to account for the omissions? Of course.”
― Lawrence Lederman, Tombstones: A Lawyer's Tales from the Takeover Decades

“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

“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

“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