What is needed, however, isn't just that people working together be nice to each other. It is discipline. Discipline is hard--harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can't even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.

When [disease] can't be stopped, that's where we become lost.

I chose surgery because I thought that perhaps this would make me more like the kind of person I wanted to be.

Go back to the '30s, '40s, '50s, and it was the discovery of heroic interventions, the ability to cure people with penicillin or do an operation to stop disease that was what saved the day. Primary care physicians couldn't do all that much that really demonstrated a difference. The people who control and work with you to control your blood pressure, they're not rewarded for doing that or to be innovative about doing that. So, the result is half of Americans have uncontrolled high blood pressure, despite seeing clinicians.

We recruit for attitude and train for skill.

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

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.