Atul Gawande said this quote

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.

~ Atul Gawande

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

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 its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.

~ Atul Gawande

All involve risk, uncertainty, and complexity — and therefore steps that are worth committing to a checklist and testing in routine care. Good checklists could become as important as doctors and nurses as good stethoscopes (which, unlike checklist, have never been proved to make a difference in patient care). The hard question — still unanswered — is whether medical culture can seize the opportunity.

~ Atul Gawande