Scar Tissue (Sunday Builders Mindset)
Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling wrote a book for his two sons before he shipped out to Iraq. He’d been told casualties in his unit could run as high as fifty percent. So he sat down and wrote what he wanted them to have if he didn’t come back.
His publisher read it and said: this isn’t like other leadership books. Most of them are people telling you how great they were. You’ve got more scar tissue in here than successes.
He took it as the highest compliment. He was right to.
We don’t do that.
We document the happy path. The README says it works — not what broke at 2 AM. The demo shows the clean case — not the potassium of 7.2 the model waved through as normal. The deck shows the win rate — not the twelve pilots that died quietly before this one.
We leave behind the success. We bury the scar.
But anyone can ship the success now. The model can write the README. It can write the demo script, the launch post, the tidy little architecture diagram.
What it can’t write is the scar. Because the scar is yours. You were in the room. You watched it fail. You know exactly where the floor gives out — because you’re the one who fell through it.
There’s an old idea worth stealing here: the ethical will. Not who gets the house. What you want the people after you to live by. The character, not the inventory.
Your codebase has one whether you write it or not.
Every system you leave behind is either an ancestor or a ghost. An ancestor hands the next builder your hard-won pattern recognition, so they don’t start from zero. A ghost just haunts them — a bug they can’t explain, a function nobody dares touch, a comment that says do not change this and never says why.
You can’t spare the next clinician everything. No one could spare you.
But if you can spare them one 2 AM — one edge case you already bled on, written down plainly, no shame in it — then you moved the whole thing forward a little.
So write down the scar, not the success.
The success was never the scarce part.
You were.
What are you building this week? Email and tell me (kevin@clinicians.build) — I read every one.
— Kevin