Top Gun Thinking: Lessons from the Operating Room and the Cockpit
An important life lesson from people who face off with death.
The universe is a nearly limitless place with infinite complexity. With our limited human minds, we will never have a perfect understanding of our world or our lives. Thus, the decisions we make and the actions we take will always be suboptimal. Accepting this reality can be liberating.
A Better Paradigm.
The way to win in life, arial combat or the trauma bay is not to sit back and wait until you have it all figured out before deciding on a course of action. Instead, the way to succeed is to use your incomplete understanding to make the best decisions you can act on that choice, observe the results and then update your understanding to make a better decision.
Where I am Coming From
I’m a surgeon who practices medicine in a high-tech hospital with all the modern laboratory and imaging technology. Despite years of training, decades of experience and all that technology, I still feel like I am winging it regularly.
The human body is a vastly complex machine, which means so many things can go wrong in such a variety of ways that there is no predicting them all. That means people…
