farmdoc's blog post number 1

On Saturday 19 April 2008 I finished reading a book called Better: a surgeon's notes on performance, written simply and humbly by Atul Gawande - an American surgeon. At the book's end he lists 'five suggestions for how one might make a worthy difference, for how one might become, in other words, a positive deviant'. These five suggestions are: Ask an unscripted question, don't complain, count something, write something, and change. This blog - titled farmdoc's blog, for I am a farming doctor, or preferably a doctoring farmer - was no more than a germ of an idea when I read Gawande's fourth suggestion (above). But it was conceived when on Sunday 20 April 2008 I signed up to blogspot.com. And it was born today - Monday 21 April 2008 - when I posted this, my first blog entry. I am already a deviant: being under the hump of the normal distribution curve has never been a comfortable place for me, not least because I don't like crowds. But I don't know if my deviance is positive or negative. I hope this blog will help me find out. And if it also helps others, in however small a way, then that can only be a good thing. I think.