Quotes About Learning

Skill, surgeons believe, can be taught; tenacity cannot.

one's willingness to engage in sustained training.

Human beings, the pioneers were learning, have a need for both privacy and community, for flexible daily rhythms and patterns, and for the possibility of forming caring relationships with those around them.

and then define a pattern around them.

no matter how hard I tried, I was almost certain to make this error at least once in the course of my career.

The companies' most effective tactic, however, was simply to put out the goods and let surgeons play.

A young doctor is not so young nowadays; you typically don't start in independent practice until your midthirties. We

They too devoted a full day to research presentations.

The discussions were sparsely attended and mostly went over my head:

Yet, in the course of fifty cases, some teams managed to halve their operating time while others failed to improve at all. Practice, it turned out, did not necessarily make perfect.

No matter how accomplished, surgeons trying something new got worse before they got better, and the learning curve proved longer, and affected by a far more complicated range of factors, than anyone had realized. It's all stark confirmation that you can't train novices without compromising patient care.

and a completely unfair question popped into my mind.

If offered the option to have someone more experienced, I certainly would have taken it. But that was simply how the system worked—no such choices were offered—and so I went along. What else could I do?

Errors are too common and widespread to be explained so simply.

If learning is necessary but causes harm, then above all it ought to apply to everyone alike.

But experience brings a new role: I am expected to teach the procedure instead.

It is all I can do not to take over. But she cannot learn without doing, I tell myself. I decide to let her have one more try.

The way that things go wrong in medicine is normally unseen and, consequently, often misunderstood.

People may hate being embarrassed and strive not to show it when they are, but embarrassment serves an important good.

I was learning. In medicine, we have long faced a conflict between the imperative to give patients the best possible care and the need to provide novices with experience. Residencies attempt to mitigate potential harm through supervision and graduated responsibility. And there is reason to think patients actually

Some I am fortunate to still keep up with. Others I was never given the chance to know as well as I wish I could have. All of them have taught me more than any could know.

WHAT DOES IT take to be good at something in which failure is so easy, so effortless?

science has filled in enough knowledge to make ineptitude as much our struggle as ignorance.

I offered no excuses. I promised to be better prepared for such cases and to be quicker to ask for help.