How to break the hidden limits of expertise | Atul Gawande for Big Think+

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“The purpose of a coach is to not be the one to set the goals, but instead to say, "Here are the kinds of goals we can work our way through.””

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Atul Gawande has spent his career studying how professionals improve, and why most eventually hit a plateau. At this point, even the most skilled experts need a coach to reveal their blind spots, as true expertise hinges on having the humility to keep learning once success arrives.

Gawande explores the paradox of mastery: the point at which experience becomes limitation, and the only path forward is to let someone else see what you can’t.

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About Atul Gawande:

Atul Gawande, MD, MPH is a renowned surgeon, author, and public health leader whose work explores how humans design and improve systems for better outcomes in complex environments. He is Professor of the Practice of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and holds the John and Cyndy Fish Chair in Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He also serves as Distinguished Professor in Residence at Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation at Brigham and Women’s and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, which he co-founded and formerly chaired.

From January 2022 to January 2025, he served as Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID. Gawande also co-founded Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery and anesthesia safer worldwide. From 2018-2020, he was CEO of Haven, the Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase healthcare venture.

A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, Gawande is the author of the best-selling books Complications (a National Book Award finalist), Better, The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal. He is the winner of two National Magazine Awards, AcademyHealth’s Impact Award for highest research impact on healthcare, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Award for writing about science.