The Difference Between Good and Great

I might need to get a subscription to The New Yorker. I’ve never read it before, but they publish some great stories. I only recently discovered the writings of Malcolm Gladwell who is a regular contributor. Those are amazingly good.

And now, I’ve just read with fascination
Annals of Medicine — The Bell Curve
, which is a story about different quality of care for different hospitals. It’s more varried than I ever would have imagined.

The hardest question for anyone who takes responsibility for what he or she does is, What if I turn out to be average? If we took all the surgeons at my level of experience, compared our results, and found that I am one of the worst, the answer would be easy: I’d turn in my scalpel. But what if I were a C? Working as I do in a city that’s mobbed with surgeons, how could I justify putting patients under the knife? I could tell myself, Someone’s got to be average. If the bell curve is a fact, then so is the reality that most doctors are going to be average. There is no shame in being one of them, right?

Link grabbed from here.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *