Writing
That’s not a clever line — it’s the actual mechanism. The page is where the thinking happens, where a half-formed thing gets dragged into the light and either holds up or falls apart. So the writing isn’t the marketing for the work. It is the work, done out loud.
One Human, Thinking Out Loud
Every week or two I write One Human, Thinking Out Loud.
It’s where I show the work in real time — what I’m reading, what I’m wrestling with, what I got wrong, what a client moment cracked open that I’m still turning over. No polish that hides the seams. If a piece ends somewhere messier than it started, that’s usually the honest place it was always going to land.
It’s written for the person who’s very good at a hard job and quietly unsure it’s enough. Surgeons, mostly. But the mail comes back from anyone who’s climbed a ladder and found the view wasn’t what the deal promised.
If that’s you, this is the front door. Everything else I do starts here.
In the journals
There’s a second kind of writing, in a place that doesn’t usually make room for it.
The cardiothoracic journals print technique and survival curves — the mechanics of the work, not the interior of the person doing it. Over the last few years they’ve started running a different kind of piece from me, and they’ve been willing to print it.
None of it is written from a safe distance. It comes out of the trail I left before I learned better, and the one I’m still walking. That’s the whole point: thought-doership doesn’t stop at the newsletter. It shows up in the field’s own record.
Opens by quoting my own 360 review — “He’s like an abusive boyfriend who you absolutely adore, but who you can never be sure won’t slap you.” I put that report in a drawer for four years. The report was right.
The surgeons who carry a patient’s death on the table in private, in silence, convinced they’re the only one who can’t shake it — and tell no one.
Building your reserves before the crisis comes, because in this work it always comes, and you don’t get to choose the day.
I hosted The Resilient Surgeon podcast for the Society of Thoracic Surgeons
Come read for a while. See if you recognize the person.