The New Yorker: I’ve been a surgeon for eight years. For the past couple of them, my performance in the operating room has reached a plateau. I’d like to think it’s a good thing—I’ve arrived at my professional peak. But mainly it seems as if I’ve just stopped getting better.
During the first two or three years in practice, your skills seem to improve almost daily. It’s not about hand-eye coördination—you have that down halfway through your residency. As one of my professors once explained, doing surgery is no more physically difficult than writing in cursive. Surgical mastery is about familiarity and judgment. You learn the problems that can occur during a particular procedure or with a particular condition, and you learn how to either prevent or respond to those problems.
4 comments:
One of Gawande's final points really struck me - in order for a coach to actually be useful, there has to be a willingness to open up and be observed, and then to take outside opinions, however potentially ego-bruising, as an attempt to make you better. Where coaches like Robert Osteen and John Hobson and Diane Harding make major improvements for their students is in allowing them to make the mistakes, then pointing them out in a direct yet respectful way that lets the student realize their mistakes first and not make value judgments about the work. The student then needs to take that input and internalize it to figure out their own solutions and correct behavior. Where coaching of top performers differs from traditional teaching is that the coach is more of an adviser and collaborative problem-solver, rather than a pure lecturer or especially a grader (at least, grading in a vacuum apart from comments and suggestions).
I think that this article was incredibly interesting because the things that make us better at our jobs or whatever it is we do are coaches and teachers. Like the comment before, it is exponentially important that the coach or teacher is being listened to. An individual has to want to improve no matter what the comments or advice happen to be. As a student right now, I expect the criticism and I expect the teachers to be hard on me personally so that I'm ready in the future and I don't merely plateau at the age of 19. I don't know half of the things that I should or can and that knowledge will hopefully help me in the future. The best part about this article is the fact that this guy was getting help around the age of 50, which only stands to say that you are never too old to go back to the basics and learn the smaller improvements. And who knows, there are probably a whole world of inventions and breakthroughs that make the work that a person does better or in an easier manner.
There is no question that good coaching is beneficial to professionals in any line of work. Yet, as the article points out there are two major factors that determine its effectiveness. First of all, the coach needs to be good. This seems like a simple enough concept, but particularly in artistic fields, it is not. This issue is highlighted by singer Renee Fleming in the article, who says that she was afraid to find a new voice teacher because they might teach her the wrong things and permanently screw up her craft. A coach that tries to pass on too many of their own ideas instead of letting their students discover their own could squash the student’s ability to be original and explore their own ideas. Second of all, the student needs to be open to the criticism offered by a coach. It is often difficult for professionals or others who believe they are the best in their field to relinquish authority to another. This idea directly affects us in the school of drama. Every student who comes here was the best their high school had to offer. As freshman we are forced to reassess all of the knowledge we have gained up to this point and once again make ourselves open, unbiased receptacles for everything CMU has to teach us.
I highly recommend Atul Gawande's book The Checklist Manifesto. It's more about managing complexity in a way that can significantly reduce mistakes in pretty much every area of work.
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