We tend to recall our winners disproportionately, a wiring flaw in our human composition. I first became acquainted with this fact when someone dear to me began touting her remarkable track record with matchmaking friends. She liked to entertain friends at social gatherings with the two marriages that had come into being due to her intervention. Much was made by …
Years ago, I read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. One of the most striking concepts in the book was what one of the top engineers at Apple called the reality distortion field, a Trekkie term co-opted to describe how Jobs made the impossible seem plausible to those in his immediate vicinity and overcame their objections to reach unlikely outcomes. …
COVID seems like such a weird way to spend a childhood…except for all the other ways. Solitary, sure. Antisocial, of course. But weird is a relative term. I was thinking back to the music videos that defined my childhood in the 1980s, and I couldn’t help but be struck by how weird it all seems in retrospect. Take an artist …
Iteration, iteration, iteration. You repeat a process with minor tweaks, incorporating what you’ve learned from your successes and failures, until you ultimately arrive at a workable solution. This is a weirdly personal case study, but I thought it adequately described a valuable process. It also demonstrates that the difference between success and failure is persistence. I have a dust problem …
It was the early 1980s, and we were eleven years old. She and her identical twin sister had been classmates for several years, teasing presences with ponytails and impish grins. In the novel marinade of hormones that flavored my outlook on absolutely everything, I began to notice her. She was my first crush. Years later I would discover a forgotten …
Yet another lesson gleaned from the Master Class by Doris Kearns Goodwin explored how great leaders dealt with putting aside awkward interpersonal dynamics in the name of pursuing the greater good. Explicitly highlighted was Abraham Lincoln. One example provided was Lincoln’s selection of Edwin Stanton to serve as his Secretary of War. Years earlier, Stanton had humiliated Lincoln. In 1855, …
I continue to iterate as I consider my future as a real estate investor. In the culmination of a 3-part series, I’d concluded that a viable next step after I depart medicine would be directly investing in real estate. In that post, I laid out my careful plan: invest in and self-manage multifamily properties, obtain Real Estate Professional Status, claim …
In the past week, there have been two deaths within my circle of friends, one of a friend’s parent, one of a friend’s child. There is grief paired with the sense that I am getting off easy. I was speaking to a mentor, a retired internist who pioneered palliative care at the academic institution where I trained decades ago. His …
Radiologist and long-time friend to the blog Vagabond MD was recently interviewed on a podcast to describe his official transition out of clinical medicine last month. I highly recommend you allocate 32 minutes of your life to listen. Vagabond outlined different considerations in his process – ranging from coming to terms with certain fantasies for a future career that he …
[A friend – let’s call him Mr. 20K – graciously acceded to write the guest post below after a conversation about his unusual frame of reference piqued my curiosity. I hope you’ll savor his thoughts and ruminations as much as I did.] I was catching up on some Crispy Doc the other day and enjoyed a post on his recent …