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181 " the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding? "
― Atul Gawande , Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
182 " along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding? The field of palliative "
183 " The philosophy is that you push the power of decision making out to the periphery and away from the center. You give people the room to adapt, based on their experience and expertise. All you ask is that they talk to one another and take responsibility. That is what works. The "
― Atul Gawande , The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
184 " Somehow, instead of holding on to the lifelong identity that was slipping away from him, he managed to redefine it. He moved his line in the sand. This is what it means to have autonomy—you may not control life’s circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them. "
185 " Those of us in medicine don’t help, for we often regard the patient on the downhill as uninteresting unless he or she has a discrete problem we can fix. "
186 " So Pabrai added the following checkpoint to his list: when analysing a company, stop and confirm that you’ve asked yourself whether the revenues might be overstated or understated due to boom or bust conditions. "
187 " The risk of a fatal car crash with a driver who’s eighty-five or older is more than three times higher than it is with a teenage driver. "
188 " And in a war that you cannot win, you don't want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don't want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can't, someone who understands that the damage is greatest if all you do is battle to the bitter end. "
189 " Our lives are inherently dependent on others and subject to forces and circumstances well beyond our control. Having more freedom seems better than having less. But to what end? The amount of freedom you have in your life is not the measure of the worth of your life. Just as safety is an empty and even self-defeating goal to live for, so ultimately is autonomy. "
190 " Whereas today people often understate their age to census takers, studies of past censuses have revealed that they used to overstate it. "
191 " And then a new question arises: If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained? "
192 " human beings need loyalty. It does not necessarily produce happiness, and can even be painful, but we all require devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable. Without it, we have only our desires to guide us, and they are fleeting, capricious, and insatiable. They provide, ultimately, only torment. "
193 " For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute "
194 " Their attitude seemed to result from incomprehension rather than cruelty, but as Tolstoy would have said, what's the difference in the end? "
195 " We've been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. "
― Atul Gawande
196 " Culture is the sum total of shared habits and expectations "
197 " elderly are left with a controlled and supervised institutional existence, a medically designed answer to unfixable problems, a life designed to be safe but empty of anything they care about. "
198 " An audience is a community. The published word is a declaration of membership in that community and also of a willingness to contribute something meaningful to it. So choose your audience. Write something. "
― Atul Gawande , Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
199 " checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized. "
200 " I see it now—this world is swiftly passing. —the warrior Karna, in the Mahabharata "
