When the Break Becomes the Backbone

There is a thing I want to say about the break in your story, the one you have been treating as evidence against yourself.

I sat in a parking lot in Nairobi for over an hour after a business partnership I had trusted fell apart in a way I had not seen coming. I was not naive in general. I was blind in one specific direction, because I had confused trust with verification and called the difference maturity. The break named the gap. I did not choose to be grateful for it immediately. That took time. What I can tell you now is this: I came back to medicine different, and the difference made me a better cardiologist, because it made me a more honest reader of the signals I had been trained to explain away.

The break that is costing you the most right now may be building the exact vertebra your backbone was missing.

You do not have to rush this. But you do have to read it honestly.

— Job