Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength. At least two kinds of courage are required… - Atul Gawande

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

At least two kinds of courage are required in aging and sickness. The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality- the courage to seek out the truth of what is to be feared and what is to be hoped. But even more daunting is the second kind of courage - the courage to act on the truth we find.

Somehow, instead of holding on to the lifelong identity that was slipping away from him, he managed to redefine it. He moved his line in the sand. This is what it means to have autonomy — 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.

attending surgeons say that what’s most important to them is finding people who are conscientious, industrious, and boneheaded enough to stick at practicing this one difficult thing day and night for years on end. As one professor of surgery put it to me, given a choice between a Ph.D. who had painstakingly cloned a gene and a talented sculptor, he’d pick the Ph.D. every time. Sure, he said, he’d bet on the sculptor being more physically talented; but he’d bet on the Ph.D. being less “flaky.” And in the end that matters more. Skill, surgeons believe, can be taught; tenacity cannot. It’s an odd approach to recruitment, but it continues all the way up the ranks, even in top surgery departments. They take minions with no experience in surgery, spend years training them, and then take most of their faculty from these same homegrown ranks.
And it works.

You do not imagine that a mere matter of etiquette could foil you. But the social dimension turns out to be as essential as the scientific — matters of how casual you should be, how formal, how reticent, how forthright. Also: how apologetic, how self-confident, how money-minded.