Ignorance is always ready to admire itself. Procure yourself critical friends.
Don’t let yourself be. Find something new to try, something to change. Count how often it succeeds and how often it doesn’t. Write about it. Ask a patient or a colleague what they think about it. See if you can keep the conversation going.
I need advice and opinion-honest opinion. I want to get better. Why go around with blinkers on?
Think about just exceeding expectations of every job you're being asked to do. Continually ask for feedback on how it's going. Ask everybody involved what you can do to do an even better job, and the world will beat down your door trying to ask you to do more and more.
A second opinion never hurts, not only in medicine, but also in politics.
There are a few people that I always say, "Hey, what do you think of this?" The minute that you know that you want this particular person to hear it, you know that you're pretty much done - although you're doing it to hear some feedback. It's a smart move to know whose ears you want.
When a book of mine comes out, I instantly go hunting the net, not for praise, but for criticism, because that's how you learn, from people who don't have to be polite to you.
When I was a young executive, I was always nervous that my idea wouldn't be great. So I asked around, 'What do you think of this?' That became my filter for whether my idea was good enough. Then I realized it just plain made me smarter.
