“ It was a couple of simple questions: Have you ever made a mistake? And, if so, what was your worst mistake? The people who said, ‘Gee, I haven’t really had one,’ or, ‘I’ve had a couple of bad outcomes but they were due to things outside my control’—invariably those were the worst candidates. And the residents who said, ‘I make mistakes all the time. There was this horrible thing that happened just yesterday and here’s what it was.’ They were the best. They had the ability to rethink everything that they’d done and imagine how they might have done it differently.
— Charles Bosk, on “a set of interviews with young doctors who had either resigned or been fired from neurosurgery-training programs, in an effort to figure out what separated the unsuccessful surgeons from their successful counterparts,” quoted in The Physical Genius
(via wka, via Coding Horror)
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The more I’ve had to deal with people professionally, the more convinced I’ve become that, as Milton Glaser says, “One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty.” Beware of people who lack the capacity for self doubt.