People seemed to have two different selves–an experiencing self who endures every moment equally and a remembering self who gives almost all the weight of judgment afterward to two single points in time, the worst moment and the last one. The remembering self seems to stick to the Peak-End rule even when the ending is an anomaly. Just a few minutes without pain at the end of their medical procedure dramatically reduced patients’ overall pain ratings even after they’d experienced more than half an hour of high level of pain. “That wasn’t so terrible, ” they’d reported afterward. A bad ending skewed the pain scores upward just as dramatically. Atul Gawande
About This Quote

This quote by Ernest Hemingway is about how people judge their lives based on the worst moment and the last one. The best moments are often overlooked because of the bad one. People are often too quick to judge their life based on one or two moments. As a result, people are always looking over their shoulder for the worst moment that will happen again.

The best moments are often overlooked because of the bad ones. What would have happened if you did not have the rainy weather on your wedding day? How would your life have been different if you had not seen your husband’s drunk driving accident?

Source: Being Mortal: Medicine And What Matters In The End

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  1. No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.

  2. Just ticking boxes is not the ultimate goal here. Embracing a culture of teamwork and discipline is. And if we recognised the opportunity, the two-minute WHO checklist is just a start.

  3. People seemed to have two different selves–an experiencing self who endures every moment equally and a remembering self who gives almost all the weight of judgment afterward to two single points in time, the worst moment and the last one. The remembering self seems to...

  4. In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments–which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and...

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