66+ Atul Gawande Quotes On Happiness, Education And Coaching

Atul Gawande is an American surgeon, writer and public health researcher. He is a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, and a staff member at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He is best known for his New Yorker articles and his books, including Complications, Better, and Being Mortal, which focus on public health and health care reform. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Atul Gawande on leadership, happiness, education.

Top 10 Atul Gawande Quotes

1. Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.
2. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need.
3. This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal.
4. We yearn for frictionless, technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way norms and standards change.
5. Just using a checklist requires [doctors] to embrace different values from ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork.
6. Writing lets you step back and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness.
7. I chose surgery because I thought that perhaps this would make me more like the kind of person I wanted to be.
8. Our ideas of what our priorities are shift as we come face-to-face with some of the struggles.
9. What is the alternative to understanding the complexity of the world?
10. I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.

Atul Gawande Short Quotes

• We recruit for attitude and train for skill.
• Man is fallible, but maybe men are less so.
• We have medicalized aging, and that experiment is failing us.
• The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life.
• And in stories, endings matter.
• Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance.
• What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can?
• Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.
• When [disease] can't be stopped, that's where we become lost.
• Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany.

Atul Gawande Quotes About Change

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. — Atul Gawande

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. — Atul Gawande

Culture matters. Of course, if physicians are rewarded or penalized for their service and results, the culture will change. But the key values we doctors are being pressed to embrace are humility, teamwork, and discipline. — Atul Gawande

The definition of what it means to be dying has changed radically. We are able to extend people's lives considerably, including sometimes, good days. — Atul Gawande

Human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change. — Atul Gawande

Don’t let yourself be. Find something new to try, something to change. Count how often it succeeds and how often it doesn’t. Write about it. Ask a patient or a colleague what they think about it. See if you can keep the conversation going. — Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande Famous Quotes And Sayings

Checklists turn out...to be among the basic tools of the quality and productivity revolution in aviation, engineering, construction - in virtually every field combining high risk and complexity. Checklists seem lowly and simplistic, but they help fill in for the gaps in our brains and between our brains. — Atul Gawande

We've created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets - and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan. — Atul Gawande

A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for it-will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?-because the difference between triumph and defeat, you'll find, isn't about willingness to take risks. It's about mastery of rescue. — Atul Gawande

At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naive. But it isn't. — Atul Gawande

No one teaches you how to think about money in medical school or residency. Yet, from the moment you start practicing, you must think about it. You must consider what is covered for a patient and what is not. — Atul Gawande

I said there are at least two kinds of satisfaction, however, and the other has nothing to do with skill. It comes from human connection. It comes from making others happy, understanding them, loving them. — Atul Gawande

Practice is funny that way. For days and days, you make out only the fragments of what to do. And then one day you've got the thing whole. Conscious learning becomes unconscious knowledge, and you cannot say precisely how. — Atul Gawande

People who reach certain levels of frailty, more important than getting their mammogram, more important than getting their blood pressure tweaked, they're at high risk of falling. If they fall and break their hip, they not only die sooner, they die miserably. — Atul Gawande

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. — Atul Gawande

Having great components is not enough, and yet we've been obsessed in medicine with components. We want the best drugs, the best technologies, the best specialists, but we don't think too much about how it all comes together. — Atul Gawande

You want to ensure people can do it right 99 percent of time. When we have to fire one of our surgical trainees, it is never because they dont have the physical skills but because they dont have the moral skills - to practise and admit failure. — Atul Gawande

These are folks that keep people out of hospitals, out of emergency rooms, out of nursing homes. And not only that, they help people achieve more fulfilling lives. — Atul Gawande

The Affordable Care Act also offered protections that allow for preexisting conditions, as people know, that you're provided coverage and you can maintain steady coverage. And that's an important part of being able to stay in care and do better over the long run. — Atul Gawande

[In medicine,] we have trained, hired and rewarded people to be cowboys, but it's pit crews that we need. — Atul Gawande

You can't make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery. Instead, you can make a recipe for how to have a team that's prepared for the unexpected. — Atul Gawande

You know, 97 percent of the time, if you come into a hospital, everything goes well. But three percent of the time, we have major complications. — Atul Gawande

When we lived in a society where we had large families that lived together, especially in agricultural societies like my grandfather and father grew up in, the result is you always had family around to take care of you. — Atul Gawande

If the conversation people think is coming is the 'death panel' conversation, that's a total failure. — Atul Gawande

Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you. — Atul Gawande

If we took away the ability to put defibrillators in people in their last years, people would be shouting in the streets. — Atul Gawande

Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes only a salve, sometimes not even that. But whatever we can offer, our interventions, and the risks and sacrifices they entail, are justified only if they serve the larger aims of a person's life. When we forget that, the suffering we inflict can be barbaric. When we remember it the good we do can be breathtaking. — Atul Gawande

Over time I learned that there are two very different satisfactions that you can have in your life. One is the satisfaction of becoming skilled at something. It almost doesn't matter what the terrain is. There is a deep, soul-feeding resonance in mastery itself, whether in teaching, writing a complicated software program, coaching a baseball team, or marshalling a group of people to start a new business. — Atul Gawande

No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it. — Atul Gawande

In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty. — Atul Gawande

Outsiders tend to be the first to recognize the inadequacies of our social institutions. But, precisely because they are outsiders, they are usually in a poor position to fix them. — Atul Gawande

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. — Atul Gawande

My biggest fear, that 27 percent of Americans under 65 have an existing health condition that, without the protections of the Affordable Care Act, would mean they would - could be automatically excluded from insurance coverage. Before the ACA, they wouldn't have been able to get insurance coverage on the individual market, you know, if you're a freelancer or if you had a small business or the like. — Atul Gawande

The evidence is that people who enter hospice don't have shorter lives. In many cases they are longer. — Atul Gawande

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. — Atul Gawande

Developing a skill is painful, though. It is difficult. And that's part of the satisfaction. You will only find meaning in what you struggle with. What you struggle to get good at next may not seem the exact right thing for you at first. With time and effort, however, you will discover new possibilities in yourself-an ability to solve problems, for instance, or to communicate, or to create beauty. — Atul Gawande

This was not guilt: guilt is what you feel when you have done something wrong. What I felt was shame: I was what was wrong. — Atul Gawande

In one study, old people assigned to a geriatrics team stayed independent for far longer, and were admitted to the hospital less. — Atul Gawande

Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength. — Atul Gawande

The striking thing is that WHO doesn't really have the authority to do any of this. It can't tell governments what to do. It hires no vaccinators, distributes no vaccine. It is a small Geneva bureaucracy run by several hundred international delegates whose annual votes tell the organization what to do but not how to do it.…The only substantial resource that WHO has cultivated is information and expertise. — Atul Gawande

I think the extreme complexity of medicine has become more than an individual clinician can handle. But not more than teams of clinicians can handle. — Atul Gawande

In psychology, there's something called the broken-leg problem. A statistical formula may be highly successful in predicting whether or not a person will go to a movie in the next week. But someone who knows that this person is laid up with a broken leg will beat the formula. No formula can take into account the infinite range of such exceptional events. — Atul Gawande

If I became just a brain in a jar - as long as I can communicate back and forth with people, that would be okay with me. — Atul Gawande

Good checklists, on the other hand are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything--a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps--the ones that even the highly skilled professional using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical. — Atul Gawande

One of the consequences of if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, is that all of us now are at risk of being a preexisting - of having a preexisting condition waiting to happen. Life, increasingly, is a preexisting condition waiting to happen, now that we have more and more of this data available. — Atul Gawande

We now have 30 percent, for example, of Medicare patients who are seeing doctors who are rewarded for doing this kind of work, like high blood pressure control. So, the Affordable Care Act has pushed this direction down the road. — Atul Gawande

Life Lessons by Atul Gawande

1. Atul Gawande emphasizes the importance of taking responsibility for one's actions and decisions, and of learning from mistakes.
2. He encourages us to strive for excellence and to be humble in our successes, as well as to recognize the value of collaboration and teamwork.
3. He teaches us to be mindful of our own mortality and to strive to make the most of the time we have in life.