"If I am the best, may I stay that way. If I am not the best, may I become that way."
Borrowed from Joan of Arc's response when she was put on trial: state of mind comes first. The desire and drive to improve has to come from within; nobody else can supply it for you.
"If you cannot explain something simply, you do not understand it."
If you do not understand it, you cannot justify it. If you cannot justify it, why are you doing it? It's very easy to hide, and very easy to pass on responsibility; there's always a fear of the unknown behind both. EM is both the best and the worst speciality for this: know what you're doing, and you have immense independent impact. Have no idea, and you'll be that much maligned triage monkey.
"Guidelines are written by those who think they understand, and are followed by those who probably don't understand."
Guidelines are like training wheels. If you need them, that's fine. But if you wish to go without them, you better understand the consequences of doing so. ALS is my key maligned example of this. "Advanced life support" to some. "All logic suspended" to me.
"The eye does not see what the mind does not know."
That which you do not know does not mean it does not exist. When lives are literally on the line, ignorance should not be an excuse.
"Perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Knowing when and how to do something is the first step. Knowing when not to do something is equally important: statins for 90-year-olds, D-dimers run for the sake of it, troponins in fast AF. Less is more.
"The definition of a good shift: nobody who was meant to die, died. Nobody who was not meant to live, lived."
It only takes one episode of successful CPR in an arrest, followed by someone producing a crumpled DNACPR form afterwards, to truly understand the meaning of disaster. That is an extreme, of course. But the mindset of "make sure the department is safe," and "make sure your clinical decisions are safe" is all that matters.
"Emergency medicine has the biggest breadth of any speciality. The depth is up to the individual."
The reality is that in EM, you need to know every speciality's language, their needs, and their curiosities. The more you know about what drives their decision-making, the more seamless your interactions with them become, and the more depth of knowledge you build, the more you can develop a "bigger picture" approach, especially when multiple specialities are involved at once.
"I am an Emergency Physician. I am sensitive. I am not specific."
Retrospect is 20/20. You face the unknown with your brain and clinical suspicion. We are an inherently paranoid speciality. Disprove the worst case scenarios. It isn't necessarily your job to fix the patient: it's to identify the patients who really need fixing now.
"I am an emergency physician. Is this actually an emergency?"
Not every patient who arrives is having one, and every patient deserves to be dealt with with due respect regardless. It is not necessarily your job to fix the world, just the piece of it in front of you, right now.