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

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments-which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.

Our ideas of what our priorities are shift as we come face-to-face with some of the struggles.

Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.

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.

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

Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance.