Eric Tian

From Where The Crawdads Sing by Deila Owens:

After only minutes, he said, “See, you can already write a word.”

“What d’ya mean?”

“C-a-b. You can write the word cab.“

“What’s cab?” she asked. He knew not to laugh.

“Don’t worry if you don’t know it. Let’s keep going. Soon you’ll write a word you know.”

Later he said, “You’ll have to work lots more on the alphabet. It’ll take a little while to get it, but you can already read a bit. I’ll show you.” He didn’t have a grammar reader, so her first book was his dad’s copy of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. He pointed to the opening sentence and asked her to read it back to him. The first word was There and she had to go back to the alphabet and practice the sound of each letter, but he was patient, explaining the special sound of th, and when she finally said it, she threw her arms up and laughed. Beaming, he watched her.

Slowly, she unraveled each word of the sentence: “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

“You can read, Kya. There will never be a time again when you can’t read.”

“It ain’t just that.” She spoke almost in a whisper. “I wadn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full.”

He smiled. “That’s a very good sentence. Not all words hold that much.”

From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

Watashiato

n. curiosity about the impact you’ve had on the lives of the people you know, wondering which of your harmless actions or long-forgotten words might have altered the plot of their stories in ways you’ll never get to see.

One of the most beautiful and terrifying things about medicine is how much you can affect a person’s life. When medicine is done right, it can be a wonderfully healing and inspiring experience. Illnesses cured, health restored, hope recovered. When medicine is done wrong – and there are so so many ways where it can go wrong – the result can be catastrophic.

It is a cause of much anxiety and hope.

The brilliance of stars would be invisible without the vast darkness of space behind them.

Do not wash away the difficult moments in life. They provide the contrast needed to appreciate the beautiful ones.

The teacher’s role is to gradually make themselves unnecessary.

A math teacher doesn’t do the student’s homework for them and call it a day because that’s useless. The student has not learnt anything. The teacher teaches the student how to do math, how to think like someone who’s good at math. The student at that moment perhaps might only want their homework to be done, but the teacher knows that the best way to support their long term growth is to impart the tools of learning and reasoning, not transcribing and memorising.

The teacher should be able to lay down a path to the student and say, If you follow down this road you will surpass me someday, and do so in a way where the student truly believes it is possible and is excited by it.

My most satisfying moments as a tutor are when I reach the end of a teaching block and look at the student I have been working with and realise that they have become powerful, independent learners, and that I finally have nothing left to teach them. Then I know my job is complete.

Tonight I was playing volleyball in the weekly social league and I pulled off a nice spike. It was one of those moments where time slows down a little and when you see the ball leave the setter’s hands you sigh a little at how perfect it is, and then you take your first step and it is a good, solid step, then you take your second step and it is also good, and then you bend your legs and explode up with both feet and you get up high, higher than usual, and suddenly your eyes are above the net and you see the whole court, with the opposing players, and right when the ball comes within firing range you engage your arms, shoulders and core and then wham, the ball flies down over the blockers and hits the floor with a resounding bang.

After I landed this spike time sped up again and I yelled Let’s gooooo, and my teammates yelled this too and we all came together to celebrate. But just as we went back to our positions one of my more experienced teammates came up to me, put his hands on my shoulders and whispered, Do it again.

I shuddered a little at this, partly because of his intensity but also because I knew he was right and I wasn’t sure if I could do it again, for a part of me knew it was a fluke and I didn’t want to have to do it again and risk being found out as a fraud. But then I remembered that a volleyball game has 25 points and there were many points to go, that in order to win we had to continuously perform at a high level, not just for one or two points, that while celebration for a nice point is well deserved, it must come with recognition that there are more hard points coming.

Anyone can hit a good spike once in a while. The difference between the average and the great comes from who can continuously do it, point after point, game after game.

There are a lot of things I’m quite happy to suck at. I’m awful at swimming, I can’t sing, dance nor play the guitar, my ability to code is mediocre at best and despite my best efforts, I suck at drawing. Could I improve with dedicated practice? Almost certainly. But sucking at these things don’t keep me up at night because they don’t matter a whole lot to me. All skills are on a bell curve and for some, I’m happy to settle for average.

But in other fields, like writing, speaking or medicine, the game changes. These skills have great significance to me and developing excellence is not merely a hobby but a necessity. Writing and speaking are the most powerful tools for communication we have and through these I believe we can change the world. Developing these skills is thus a prerequisite for meaningful action. Medical excellence is a moral requirement for improving the field of medicine, and waging war against disease is a battle I am happy to fight.

There exist areas in our lives that demand excellence, where doing a good job is not just a fleeting interest but a moral requirement. Some areas we willingly choose to bear the burden of, some we are simply given by circumstance. Whatever they are, it is our duty – perhaps even our fate – to do them well.

From Charlotte’s Web:

“Why did you do all this for me? ” he asked. “I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.”

“You have been my friend,” replied Charlotte. “That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”

In my apartment there are four elevators, though most of the time at least one is broken. Because four is a criminally small amount for an apartment with 500+ residents, when I enter from my floor, the lift often already has people in it and the trip down often requires multiple stops.

The atmosphere in apartment lifts can be variable, sometimes on rare occasions it is empty and you enjoy the solitude, sometimes there are people talking and you try not to eavesdrop, but fail since the space is so small, but mostly the atmosphere is tense, driven by a desperate desire for the lift to reach the appointed floor as fast as possible and to please, please stop stopping at these floors where strangers get on who hear you breathe and cramp up the space. When the lift opens at my floor and there are people inside, the look in their eyes say God, did you really have to press this lift at this time? Couldn’t you have waited a little bit and gotten on another one? In response I hurry in, overwhelmed by this guilt and and smash the door-close button and tap my feet and adopt the same hurried attitude as everybody else. But recently I’ve started an experiment.

The experiment is instead of hurrying in, I instead meet everyone’s gaze and smile at everyone in the lift. It’s not a terribly big smile, that would be a little weird, but enough where one feels recognised and feels like I’m happy to see them. All of this takes less than a few seconds, I do it as I walk in so as to not waste time, then I resume the journey down.

Most of the time I get nothing, I’ll smile and people either don’t see or they see my smile and ignore it. This hurt at first but soon I realised it was the default and now I don’t really mind. But sometimes, something magical happens: I get a smile back. And then I know I have connected with somebody, that we have seen each other, and acknowledged each other’s existence, and this makes me happy. Occasionally, these moments even result in a little conversation, a casual How do you do? or a comment about clothes or something we are holding. These moments are rare, last only a few seconds, but are so precious, for it is frankly quite difficult to build enough trust with a stranger to engage in conversation, but somehow, a smile acts as an invitation to speak, it is an act of generous curiosity and says, I don’t know you at all, but I appreciate your existence, and this can spark amazing things.

Smiling is one of those things that take incredibly little effort but can have enormous expected values. Such gifts are nothing short of magic.

In my experience being around top medical students, a field notorious for its immense learning curve and volume of content, one of the key ingredients for excellence is consistent practice.

Top students tend to study, hone their physical exam skills and speak to patients throughout the year rather than right before an assessment. Every day they are improving, 1% at a time, and over the span of years this leads to amazing results.

Other factors influence excellence, no doubt: one’s socioeconomic status, level of human supports, studying techniques and more will shift the playing zone. However once a certain level of stability has been reached, the distance between action and results seems to shrink with effort and consistency.

This trend might not be limited to learning, but extend to other domains also, as Malcolm Gladwell writes in Outliers:

Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it.

Related: The Mundanity of Excellence.

Today my ward round finished early and I was drinking coffee with the team. I sat there listening quietly as the doctors twenty years my senior discussed topics such as the late Queen’s life, what life was like before the internet and their wonderful stories from decades practicing as a physician. As a student, my participation in this conversation was limited: they were all full-time doctors before I was born and I could not relate at all to the world that they were discussing.

However, by some luck, the topic of books arose and titles such as Harry Potter and The Alchemist began to be discussed and I felt myself contributing to these topics, slowly at first, then more eagerly, and the doctors welcomed my enthusiasm. Our little discussion grew into a passionate affair and I began to feel a kinship in our little discussion, for at that moment, our united interest in fiction seemed to break down hospital power dynamics and we were able to debate and share opinions not as student to consultant, but as reader to reader.

One of the deepest powers of literature is the ability to touch people universally, across generations and time.