He was learning from Rachel, too. They went skiing—he had never been skiing before, but she’d learned because her school had a ski trip every year and finally, when she was a senior, her grandmother handed over the $250 and let her go. She was helping him negotiate the strange, surprising, suddenly political machinations of medical school that were beyond good grades. His residency advisor didn’t like how sarcastic he was; Aaron Schwartz, a sallow-skinned pigeon of a guy he knew not just from Princeton, but who had gone to his high school in Los Angeles, was also in his med school class and kept getting favored for surgeries. Rachel talked to him about how to talk to people. She taught him how the fact that he was naturally funny also meant that he had a side that favored a quick burn, which wasn’t so good. She taught him to slow down and consider people’s faces, that this was the most crucial exercise in all of negotiation, and eventually he did it—he learned to listen to people and to look them in the eyes. And wouldn’t you know, when he finally was able to enact these skills, he became a better doctor, one who could understand his patients’ suffering more specifically, who could listen more closely for clues. He shot ahead of Aaron Schwartz, earning praise from the doctors in charge and his teachers for his sensitivity and intuition. He would always commend her for teaching him a skill that no one had taught him throughout all his years of med school, and she would respond, “That’s because they don’t want you to get ahead.” When she said that, he’d realize she wasn’t trying to make him a better person; she was trying to get him to advance. That was all she’d ever tried to do for him. But, he reasoned, that was because she thought he was a good enough person as it was.