Positive Deviance

Atul Gawande is a good surgeon and a really good writer.

He's written a book called Better. It's about how the medical profession and non-medical professionals, and presumably almost anyone, can systematically become better at what they do.
Two examples are: industrial/human-factors engineering to improve hand-washing compliance; the DRASH system (a 900 square-foot mobile hospital that fits in five backpacks and can be setup in ~30 minutes) for Forward Surgical Teams in the military -- which cut the death rate from 25% to less than 10% for battlefield injuries.

Gawande's three basic observations of people who are positive deviants -- presumably better than about 95% of the relevant population:

1. They don't complain.
2. They write about what they do.
3. They count something.

One example of someone who fulfills those requirements, or at least the latter two of the three, is Jim Plagakis, a pharmacist.


I want to be a better student and a better systems engineer.

I'm pretty good about not complaining about school. I am not good at writing, or rather following a good writing process, nevermind writing about school. I don't count anything regarding school. I could, though. For instance, regarding writing, I could measure how long it takes me to write a page of text given a decent outline and enough background information and research.

I complain about system engineering and the general IT processes at my workplace. Often I'm complaining internally or to friends without any vested interest in IT. ...when I should be writing things down into coherent things that might be instrumental in changing our IT department and processes. I don't count anything at work, either. But there are probably multitudes of indicators available for investigation. I started to time my system deployments but haven't really continued to do so.

(Actually doing those three things is a real bitch when coping with depression.)

So, you should read Better. (And Complications. And Jerome Groopman's How Doctors Think.)