Once a year, my family and I spend a week at the beach.
They like to sleep in. I don't. So one morning, while the room is still quiet, I slip down to the same resort restaurant, take the same seat, and order my breakfast. Eggs, the way I always have them.
And every year, the same man brings them to me.
His name is Sam.
We've been doing this little dance for years. I'd recognize him anywhere. I know his walk. I know the way he sets the plate down, the easy "there you go" he says every time. Of all the small rituals of that trip, breakfast with Sam is one of my favorites.
He has no idea who I am.
He's warm, he's gracious, he's wonderful at his job. But it's the same warmth he hands to every guest at every table. There's no flicker of oh, it's you again. No "welcome back." Just a kind stranger, serving me eggs like it's the first time — for what has to be the fifth or sixth year in a row.
For years I chalked it up to him being a true professional. The guy probably serves ten thousand plates a year. Of course he doesn't remember one of them.
But it nagged at me. Because at work, the exact same thing happens to me. Just flipped.
I'm an anesthesiologist
A few times a year, someone stops me. In the grocery store. In the pre-op hallway. At a kid's birthday party.
"You probably don't remember me. You did my surgery back in 2019. I was terrified, and you held my hand and told me I'd be okay. I never forgot it."
And they're right. I don't remember them.
I want to. I smile and nod and say something warm, and I mean it. But I'm searching their face for a thread, any thread, and there's nothing there. I've been part of thousands of surgeries. To me, that morning in 2019 was a Tuesday. One of six cases before lunch.
To them, it was one of the most frightening days of their life. I was the last face they saw before the lights went out, and sometimes the first voice they heard when they came back.
Of course they remember me. I was the entire world for a few minutes on the scariest morning they'd had in years.
And I don't remember them at all.
The thing I keep thinking about
It took me an embarrassingly long time to see it.
I am Sam. Sam is me.
We're standing on opposite ends of the exact same asymmetry, both of us, all the time. I remember the waiter and he forgets me. The patient remembers me and I forget them. Same phenomenon. We're each just holding a different end of it.
I'm sure there's real brain science here, and I'm not a neuroscientist, so I won't pretend to explain it well. But the pattern seems clear enough, even from the cheap seats.
Memory doesn't track how often you saw someone. It tracks how much the moment mattered to you.
Those quiet beach mornings are a small, glowing ritual in my year, so my brain files Sam under "important." To Sam, I'm one of a thousand faces he served that summer, so I never get filed at all. The patient is having the highest-stakes morning of their year, so they burn my face into memory like a flashbulb. I'm running my normal Tuesday, so they never make it past my short-term memory.
The encounter was identical. The significance wasn't. And memory follows significance, not time spent.
You're remembered in proportion to the role you played in someone's story. Not how often they saw you. Not even how well you remember them back.
It's everyone
Once you see it, you see it everywhere.
There's a college communications professor, Dr. DeSantis, who I still quote at dinner parties. He changed the way I think. And he has, I'd bet my house, absolutely no memory of me. I was one of thirty kids in one of five classes across thirty years of teaching.
I'm his patient. He's my waiter.
Everyone you've ever met is like this. We are all, at the same time, somebody's forgettable waiter and somebody's unforgettable anesthesiologist. You're walking around carrying the faces of people who will never think of you again. And other people are carrying yours — people you wouldn't recognize on the street.
The bottom line
Here's the part that actually changed how I work.
The moments that feel routine to you are, somewhere across the table, the most important moment in the room. The Tuesday case. The two-minute phone call. The email you fired off and forgot by lunch. The thing you did on autopilot.
You will not remember it. They will never forget it.
That sounds like a burden, and maybe it is. But I think it's mostly a standard. Because Sam doesn't remember me, and he still makes those quiet mornings one of the best parts of that trip, every single year. He shows up fully for a stranger he'll never recognize again. He treats the forgettable encounter like it matters, because to the person across the table, it does.
That's the whole thing. That's the job, in the OR and out of it.
I don't get to remember every patient. I've made my peace with that. What I get to decide is how I show up in the few minutes that I'll forget and they never will.
So here's my question for you this week:
Where are you the anesthesiologist? Where are you doing something on autopilot, something you'll forget by Friday, that's quietly the most important moment in someone else's year? And are you showing up for it like it matters, even knowing you won't remember it?
Reply and tell me about it. I can't respond to everyone, but I read every single one.
That's all for this week. See you next weekend!