In the years since this experience ... I have sought to encourage trainees and students to reorient their focus from patient outcomes as a referendum on their competency and to focus instead on the process-based thinking preceding them and to try to make space for the mystery between.

Benjamin W. Frush reflects on the perils of an outcome-focused culture in medicine.

The essay read in this episode was published in the Teaching and Learning Moments column in the October 2025 issue of Academic Medicine. Read the essay at academicmedicine.org.