Atul Gawande: What Dying Teaches Us About How to Live

I'm excited for today's conversation because my hope is that we'll just have this conversation as friends who are going to help each other explore this question that has been on my mind more and more over the years, which is, what does it really mean to live a deeply fulfilling life? Here's a question I would love to start with.

If you go back, Atul, to your childhood, Can you tell me about a person or an experience early in life who shaped your beliefs about what a good life actually is?

I grew up in rural Ohio in a small town, Athens, Ohio, a college town near the West Virginia-Kentucky borders.

And I was mainly just trying to figure out how do I belong in a place where It was, my parents were Indian immigrant physicians caring for people in, you know, a poor community.

It has the highest poverty rate in the state as a county.

And my mom was the second pediatrician to be there.

My father was a urologist and general surgeon arriving in town.

in the early 1970s.

And I didn't belong for a million reasons.

And I think everybody has this feeling like you don't belong.

And so the number one thing about having meaning in life that I felt like I identified with as a kid was whether you belong and that striving to belong.

And so the people that I think of are my parents who were trying to instill in me that Who cares if you belong? We had a funny religion with Hinduism.

Difficult to raise a Hindu in rural Ohio.

I was already like, what are we doing? And then we're the richest people in town.

We had the only Mercedes.

My parents are two doctors doing well in a poor community.

We had a swimming pool in the backyard.

I had prospects in my life that I knew I would have expectations and exposure from my parents that other people wouldn't have.

You know, they expected me to become a doctor or to at least go to graduate school, like forget just undergrad.

And half of my high school class didn't go to college.

So when I think about the people who were influential, I think of teachers who allowed my nerdiness to flourish.

But I think of that time and them as creating ways that I could belong and make sure I was trying to be myself.

I'm also at this time wearing bib overalls and Rocky Mountain boots to try to fit in and trying to chew tobacco like my classmates and all of that kind of stuff.

Wow, I'm

trying to imagine you in overalls and chewing tobacco.