How successful you feel is often more about how you define success than it’s about what you’ve achieved. I learned that early on in my medical career. Like most medical students, I saw medicine in terms of the ability to work out a cure for whatever ailed people. I still…

Reflections on a faith journey — The first time I returned to faith was on a balcony in my medical school. My mum had come to faith in my first year of life, while doing her Masters in Michigan State University. She had grown up in a religious home with her parents being regular church attenders…

Living with performance anxiety — I’ve never been a natural performer. And I mean that in the most general sense. As a child I wouldn’t even raise my hand in class even if no one else knew the answers and I did. And it wasn’t even so much out of any fear of being considered…

Living with “an abiding sense of tragedy” — A friend recently asked me: Have you ever felt a sense of futility? Wondering if anything you do actually makes a difference?” The first thought to mind for me was, You mean that feeling that’s always on the edge of my mind? You’ve gone decades of life without it as…

Pain comes to us all, but it lands much harder when we think of it as something we shouldn’t ever experience, and not simply as life’s “cost of doing business”. The reason for this lies in how pain works. Pain has two sides to it: The feeling of pain itself-we…

We do it every time we explain people doing terrible things by insisting they must be ignorant, mentally ill or subhuman. And it’s understandable: the darker parts of ourselves are-well, dark. Easier to turn away than face that head-on. But to turn from our dark side is to turn from…

When you’re on the inside, it’s easy to think of diversity as mainly for the benefit of the “other people” — you know, so “they” get a chance to be in the room where it happens. That’s a mistake. Diversity is really just the sensible thing if we have any…

I recently read a well-intended but naive suggestion: that people should explain their cultures to others new to it. If I’ve learned anything moving to the UK, it’s that none of us really knows our cultures. Not from inside. It takes someone breaking our cultural rules for us to even…

Or, the danger of trying to be Harper Lee — Harper Lee did what many creatives dream of — she threw all her energy into one work of genius: To Kill a Mockingbird. As strategies go, it’s a recipe for disaster. Not just because chances are very slim that you or I can be as lucky — but also because…