Writing Lets You Step Back

Over Time I Learned That There Are Two Very Different Satisfactions That You Can Have In Your Life. One Is The Satisfaction Of Becoming Skilled At Something. It Almost Doesn't Matter What The Terrain Is. There Is A Deep, Soul-feeding Resonance In Mastery Itself, Whether In Teaching, Writing A Complicated Software Program, Coaching A Baseball Team, Or Marshalling A Group Of People To Start A New Business.

Developing A Skill Is Painful, Though. It Is Difficult. And That's Part Of The Satisfaction. You Will Only Find Meaning In What You Struggle With. What You Struggle To Get Good At Next May Not Seem The Exact Right Thing For You At First. With Time And Effort, However, You Will Discover New Possibilities In Yourself-an Ability To Solve Problems, For Instance, Or To Communicate, Or To Create Beauty.

Arriving At An Acceptance Of One's Mortality Is A Process, Not An Epiphany.

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.

We Recruit For Attitude And Train For Skill.