Everyone who works in health systems knows that if you design your system around exceptional people, it won’t work. You can’t assume that people will be brave, wise, or unerring. You need to assume that people will be ordinary. Sometimes amazing, sometimes terrible, and generally mediocre. You design systems for average people doing average work. If your systems requires extraordinary people, you are screwed.

And you know what? We are totally screwed. Our soil is literally producing vegetables with less nutrition. Climate change is accelerating and our attempts at stopping it are pathetic. For ten years in a row, the world has seen increases in conflict deaths. And Syria. And Iraq. And Afghanistan. And Ebola, Zika, and dengue.

I’ll stop there, but I believe the point is made. Screwed.

So, our system is broken and there is no authority out there to fix it. Too many elites are benefiting from watching us burn.

What next, then? My best guess is brave. Our systems are too damaged to function without exceptional people. So it’s time to become exceptional. To do jobs that matter, to do them better, to leverage our time and our money and our willingness to make a lot of fucking noise in an attempt to force this broken world to turn out just a little bit better.