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“We are used to thinking of doctoring as a solitary, intellectual task. But making medicine go right is less often like making a difficult diagnosis than like making sure everyone washes their hands.”
― Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
― Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
“The hardest question for anyone who takes responsibility for what he or she does is, What if I turn out to be average?”
― Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
― Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
“People underestimate the importance of dilligence as a virtue. No doubt it has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as "the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken."... Understood, however, as the prerequisite of great accomplishment, diligence stands as one of the most difficult challenges facing any group of people who take on tasks of risk and consequence. It sets a high, seemingly impossible, expectation for performance and human behavior.”
― Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
― Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
“Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change. It arises from deliberate, even obsessive, reflection on failure and a constant searching for new solutions.”
― Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
― Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
“Betterment is perpetual labor. The world is chaotic, disorganized, and vexing, and medicine is nowhere spared that reality. To complicate matters, we in medicine are also only human ourselves. We are distractible, weak, and given to our own concerns. Yet still, to live as a doctor is to live so that one's life is bound up in others' and in science and in the messy, complicated connection between the two It is to live a life of responsibility. The question then, is not whether one accepts the responsibility. Just by doing this work, one has. The question is, having accepted the responsibility, how one does such work well.”
― Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
― Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
Ashley’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Ashley’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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