Definitely Not the Pits

30 years after TV phenom ER captured the attention of viewing audiences, one of its stars is once again fighting for patients’ lives in a new screen venue. ER featured a fresh-faced Noah Wyle as a newly-minted doctor in an urban Chicago hospital emergency room; within its worn facilities he gamely faced a daily deluge of the city’s citizens, victims of violence, carelessness, poverty and bad luck.

But ER also featured hospital politics and budget concerns and storylines related to staff life, issues such as career concerns, family conflicts or romantic entanglements. This go-around Wyle is back in the emergency room in Pittsburgh as a veteran medic: several decades older and, possibly, wiser.

Predictions: Not for the Faint of Heart

With constant change, upheaval and churn all around us, we yearn to know that we might predict our way to a future that seems calmer and clearer. Any new year brings resolutions for improvement and very quickly resolutions morph into predictions as to how things might look. Predictability is super seductive at these times, providing that much longed for sense that we have our bearings, know pretty well what is going on around us and can leverage those insights to plot out a trajectory to our future. As 2025 gave way to the early days of 2026, however, many of SmarterWisdom’s clients are not feeling as if they possess the prerequisites to do so. As a result, many don’t feel confident predicting a future based on their own insights.

The Winner Takes It All

As readers of Words of Wisdom have surely observed, I like win-win arrangements. At their core, they are self-managing, since everyone needed to make the solution work is also invested in reaping its benefits. The solution itself has built-in motivation, since everyone involved is motivated to make them succeed! Really solid win/wins are self-fueling, so they don’t need continual monitoring, pressure applied from the outside or a pipeline of external energy to keep them running for quite a while. These are the reasons why I love the concept so much!