Better

So the full title of this book is Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande. I've never understood it, but I get a lot of questioning looks when I pull out one of my medical books to read. My grandma asked if it was a textbook that I was reading for school the other week. No. Just a book, for fun. I love a good medical book. They are some of the most interesting books I've read. (Especially as far as learning new things goes.) I have another book by this same author, Atul Gawande, and I love it just as much. He writes in a fantastic way that brings things to a lower level (so you can actually understand what he's talking about), but you don't feel like he's dumbing it down. He just makes it much easier to understand.

In the book, Better, he talks about the struggle in medicine to perform well in circumstances that aren't always under your control. Gawande divides the book into three sections, talking about diligence, the challenge to do right, and ingenuity. I loved his examples in the book, the cases that he talked about and what worked and what didn't.

Here's a quote from the book.
"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."

At the end he gives five suggestions to make a worthy difference, or to be a  positive deviant. Now he's aiming these all towards the medical field but I think they're completely applicable in any other field of life.
1. Ask an unscripted question. "Ours is a job of talking to strangers. Why not learn something about them?"
2. Don't complain. "Nothing in medicine is more dispiriting than hearing doctors complain... Resist it. It's boring, it doesn't solve anything, and it will get you down. You don't have to be sunny about everything. Just be prepared with something else to discuss."
3. Count something. "Regardless of what one ultimately does in medicine - or outside medicine, for that matter - one should be a scientist in this world. If you count something you find interesting, you will learn something interesting."
4. Write something. "Writing lets you step back and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness."
5. Change. "Be willing to recognize the inadequacies in what you do and to seek out solutions."

"So find something new to try, something to change. Count how often you succeed and how often you fail. Write about it. Ask people what they think. See if you can keep the conversation going."