Are you a carpenter or a gardener? This Philly surgeon shares how he pairs precision and compassion.

I once heard someone use the metaphor of being a carpenter versus a gardener to describe different ways to approach our work and life.

Some situations require the exactness of carpentry, precisely controlling for the conditions of the workshop, its equipment, exact dimensions, and composition of the wood. The goal: a product exactly as planned.

Surgeons often approach our work like a carpenter. In many aspects of medicine, precision is key: Patients need specific dosages of medication, and surgical cuts and sutures often need to be exact, especially when a physician is operating on something as small as an artery.

That level of control is rewarding. Some days, even after leaving the operating room, I find myself wanting to approach everything else in work and life in the same manner, with the precision of carpentry.

But that’s when the nuances of patient care remind me that it’s important for doctors to think like a gardener, too.

A gardener recognizes that there are many variables in life that we cannot control.

Outside of the operating room, the world is more like a garden than a workshop. The factors that affect our patients’ health are often beyond our control. One patient may choose a surgery that another declines. They may become sick again — and we may not always understand why.

To provide the best care to our patients, doctors must think like both a carpenter and a gardener.

I used to think that the goal of surgery and becoming a surgeon was to control as much as possible, to engineer an unassailable solution, to prevent every complication.

But now I recognize that control is just a small, artificial part of the process. Some aspects of my day resemble carpentry, but we all live in a world that is akin to a garden.

Jason Han is a cardiac surgery resident at a Philadelphia hospital and contributor to The Inquirer’s Health section.