“We all have those books that sit on a nightstand, half-finished for weeks, right? Months? Maybe a year?
*cough*
Well, at some point you have to look at them and say, “I may not be finishing that one.”
Or, alternatively, you can look at it and say, “Man, fuck this book.”
It’s not like there was anything terribly wrong with the book or anything. I just…I feel like I got the idea pretty early on.
Premise:
Humans are to the point where we’ve uncovered so much knowledge that human minds can’t hold all of it. AND processes have become not only long, but very complex in some cases. Rather than count on simplification or drilling in knowledge, a checklist can be a really great solution.
The best example related to flying bombers in the 30’s. Basically, the new planes were complicated enough that they kept crashing until a pre-flight checklist was instituted, and then everything was rad.
In my personal life, the closest thing I have to flying a bomber is passengering on a commercial flight. Going without a checklist, I’ve shown up at destinations missing everything from toothbrushes (replaceable), to any sort of reasonable footwear (more a problem), to swim trunks (which is actually on purpose because swimming is for suckers).
The problem I have with checklists is that I’m really awesome at using them to replace ACTUALLY DOING THE THING for which the checklist was created. If I’m going to do some serious cleaning, I might get it in my head to do a checklist first so that I don’t waste any time. Why clean the spiders out of the curtains before cleaning the beetles out of the kitchen? Might as well do beetles first, then spiders, right? And centipedes….well, we always get rid of centipedes immediately. I don’t know which dimension they escaped from, but I do know that it’s a dark place that I would like to avoid.
Anyway, by the time I get the cleaning checklist and necessary bug taxonomy notes wrapped up and bound by a plastic spiral at Kinko’s, I feel like I’ve already done a lot of work. Which makes it hard to rally and do the actual work.
Gawande’s other books, Complications and Better, also had really simple messages explained in a way even us dum-dums could understand. But the message of this one, though important, was easy even for me, Archduke of Dum-Dums, to understand, and it might not have required a whole book.
Now, I didn’t get to be Archduke by making great choices, so it’s entirely possible that there is some great stuff later in the book that I didn’t get to. So if someone tells you this is a really great book and you have nagging doubts, just remember that those doubts were planted by a guy who uses a spatula for a scepter to punctuate the royal addresses he makes aloud to absolutely no one in his insect-filled kitchen.”