You Know, 97 Percent Of The Time,

Making Systems Work Is The Great Task Of My Generation Of Physicians And Scientists. But I Would Go Further And Say That Making Systems Work - Whether In Healthcare, Education, Climate Change, Making A Pathway Out Of Poverty - Is The Great Task Of Our Generation As A Whole.

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 Always Hope For The Easy Fix: The One Simple Change That Will Erase A Problem In A Stroke. But Few Things In Life Work This Way. Instead, Success Requires Making A Hundred Small Steps Go Right - One After The Other, No Slipups, No Goofs, Everyone Pitching In.

I Learned About A Lot Of Things In Medical School, But Mortality Wasn't One Of Them.

The Possibilities And Probabilities Are All We Have To Work With In Medicine, Though. What We Are Drawn To In This Imperfect Science, What We In Fact Covet In Our Way, Is The Alterable Moment-the Fragile But Crystalline Opportunity For One's Know-how, Ability, Or Just Gut Instinct To Change The Course Of Another's Life For The Better.