Personal Best By Atul Gawande Summary

Many people live with the assumption that once you’ve completed a lesson or passed certain stage in life, you’ve mastered that part of or certain level of learning and therefore one doesn’t need any more lessons, teachings, or coaching. This would be false because no matter how much you think you know or mastered there is always room to learn. In the process, you will learn new things and rediscover better ways of doing things you already knew. This idea that you can never stop learning was witnessed by Atul Gawande, a surgeon who initially thought his performance in operating room has reached a level where he couldn’t get any better than he already is, that he is at the height of his performance, but then realized that even a well-trained surgeon like himself, who has been doing surgeries for years felt that he is still in the process of learning. …show more content…
It wasn’t until he played a game of tennis with a club pro who was much younger than him. He stated that the club pro was in his early twenties and a recent graduate who played on his college team. In the article Gawande says “my serve had always been the best part of my game. But I listened”. He said this because the club pro suggested that his serve could use some work. He listened to the club pro and realized that what he suggested was correct. His serves did need a little adjustment. A similar situation occurred in the article “You can grow your brain” by Lisa Blackwell. In this article people who couldn’t juggle or thought they couldn’t juggle learned how to. They found that the part of the brain that controlled our ability to learn to juggle grew. A similar situation had to occur when Gawande’s serve position was corrected because it made him serve better. This means it grew the parts of his brain which gave him the ability to serve in