From Hightstown High School to Medicine, Mentorship, and Meaning
Three books can change your Thursday. One book can change your world.
Hello,
It’s been more than 30 years since I last walked the halls of Hightstown High School.
Three decades since the morning bell signaled the start of another day filled with laughter, awkwardness, quiet ambitions, and endless energy. Some days were joyous, others full of teenage confusion. Most were just chaotic in the way only high school can be.
Back then, my life revolved around sports. Fall meant soccer, winter was for ice hockey, and spring—always—was baseball. My teammates were my closest friends, and nearly every day after school, we stayed long after the final bell, chasing greatness on whatever field or rink we could find. Wins and losses came and went, but what remained was the feeling of being part of something—of giving your best effort in pursuit of a common goal. That’s what high school was for me: team, routine, resilience, and the beginning of becoming.
Of course, there were bumps along the way—social missteps, academic pressure, the ever-present maze of teenage identity. Girls, grades, friendships, and futures. And yes, some unforgettable characters. It was New Jersey in the ’80/90s—we even had a smoking porch outside the cafeteria. Hightstown was nothing if not colorful.
By the end of senior year, I was ready to leave it all behind. I chose the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a school in a state I had never even looked at on a map. I wanted something different, a clean break. But within months, I found myself missing it all—the streets of my hometown, the rhythm of familiarity, the friends who knew me before I knew myself.
That’s the thing about the places that shape us: we never really leave them. They stay tucked inside, even as the years stretch on. Faces blur, names fade, and yet—some part of you is still walking those halls.
Two nights ago, I felt it again.
At the Hightstown High School Sports Banquet, something I never could have imagined back in 1993 took place: The inaugural Rosh Legacy Award was given to two student-athletes—one from the softball team and one from baseball. The award isn’t about stats or medals. It’s about impact. It’s about grit, leadership, integrity, and team-first commitment. It’s about how you make people feel, how you lift others up, and how you carry yourself when no one’s watching.
I wasn’t there in person. But my father was—sitting in the audience. And one of my best friends from childhood, David Gorner—the same kid I met in nursery school, the same teammate I battled with on baseball fields for over a decade—stood on stage and read the words we wrote together. He honored two remarkable athletes who now carry the torch.
Their names—Kady Olsen and Michael Guarino—are the first to be etched into the Rosh Legacy Award. But what moved me most was realizing that this isn’t about what I left behind. It’s about what they carry forward.
Legacy isn’t a statue or a speech. It’s not something you hand down like an old glove or a folded jersey. Legacy is a motion. A set of values put into practice, passed hand to hand, through effort, through example. You live it first. Then you step aside. And if you’ve done it right, someone else picks it up—and carries it farther than you ever could.
That’s what last night meant to me. That even from 2,000 miles away, something I care deeply about—grit, leadership, commitment—found a way to keep going. That in an auditorium I haven’t stepped inside in over thirty years, surrounded by faces I may never meet, a seed I planted took root.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of impact. How we can influence others not by preaching, but by living. Not by controlling, but by modeling. Not by staying, but by preparing others to go.
The Rosh Legacy Award is just a small gesture. But it’s one that honors a bigger idea: that your life becomes most meaningful when you make it about more than just yourself.
Here is Coach David Gorner, the natural, announcing the Rosh Legacy Award at the annual Hightstown High School Senior Awards Night. He crushes it.
Welcome to this week’s Three Book Thursday.
P.S. Happy Birthday Dad
P.P.S Thank you Rhys Rosh for encouraging me to write this story
1. Biography
The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man
Summary
Some books feel like a long conversation with someone who’s lived through everything—and come out wiser, lighter, and more grounded on the other side.
The Book of Charlie is exactly that.
David Von Drehle introduces us to Charlie White, his neighbor in Kansas City, who, by the time they met, was already past 100 years old. But don’t let the number fool you. Charlie wasn’t coasting into old age—he was living. Fully. Curiously. With grace and grit and a deep well of perspective.
Over the course of their friendship, Von Drehle unearthed a life that reads like fiction: orphaned at 6, medical school in the midst of the Great Depression, Hollywood house calls in the golden age of film, World War II, deep personal losses, reinventions, risks, and wisdom gathered across ten decades. Charlie didn’t just live through history—he lived through change. And he never stopped evolving.
What makes this book so powerful isn’t just the extraordinary life story—it’s the posture Charlie held toward life itself.
He stayed open. He adapted. He kept his sense of humor. He remained rooted in principle but was never bitter. He believed that a meaningful life wasn’t defined by status or accomplishment, but by the ability to grow, to love, to endure, and to keep going.
Reading it reminded me that wisdom doesn’t come from age alone—it comes from how you live through your years. Charlie turned tragedy into compassion, discipline into freedom, and curiosity into longevity. For anyone navigating uncertainty, change, or simply trying to stay connected to what really matters, Charlie’s story is a quiet reminder that joy, strength, and purpose don’t retire with age. They evolve. If we let them.
This is a book to slow down with. To reflect alongside. To remember what kind of legacy you want to leave—not just in terms of what you did, but in who you were while you were doing it.
And Charlie? He was the kind of person we should all hope to become.
Favorite Quote, Insight, & Principle
Quote: “Love the hand that fate deals you and play it as your own.” -Marcus Aurelius.
Insight: Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
Principle: Charlie understood that we don't live in the world's future; we live in our own present moment, inside the much smaller zone of our actions and our own will. We can't control tomorrow: that's realism. But optimism teaches that we can watch for tomorrow, seek to understand it, and leap when the moment arrives to grasp it–perhaps even to shape it.
Author: David Von Drehle
Themes: Biography, On living and dying, Living a full life
2. Patient care
Becoming a Doctor: A Journey of Initiation in Medical School
Summary
Becoming a Doctor: A Journey of Initiation in Medical School isn’t just a memoir—it’s a mirror. A mirror held up to the raw, unfiltered transformation that happens when someone decides to dedicate their life to medicine.
I read this book while in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. At the time, I was straddling two worlds: one foot still in the lab, the other beginning to step toward the clinic. I didn’t have a clear plan yet—but I had a longing. A sense that maybe medicine was the path. This book lit the fire. It didn’t glamorize the profession. It didn’t promise certainty. But it showed me, with brutal honesty and breathtaking clarity, what it felt like to become a doctor. And that made all the difference.
Melvin Konner came to medical school with a background in anthropology—and that lens makes this book different from any other memoir about training in medicine. He sees things most students don’t. He questions rituals others accept. He pays attention to what we often overlook: the subtle, the human, the spiritual. Through each rotation—pediatrics, surgery, psychiatry—Konner doesn’t just observe the medicine. He observes the people behind it. The mentors who shape him. The systems that constrain him. The moments that almost break him.
But what makes this book unforgettable is its honesty. It’s a chronicle of becoming—not just a doctor, but a person. A person who is asked to witness suffering, to make impossible decisions, to carry the weight of other people’s lives—and still find their own center. There are no shortcuts here. No polished narrative. Just the slow, often painful process of learning how to think like a physician and feel like a human being at the same time.
This book was my compass. It clarified that medicine was not about being perfect—it was about being present. About showing up when things are hard. About learning to listen, to lead, to care—and to keep caring even when you’re tired.
For anyone on the path to medicine—or even just considering it—Becoming a Doctor will challenge and affirm you in equal measure. And for those long past their training, it’s a beautiful reminder of why we chose this life in the first place.
Because becoming a doctor isn’t a title. It’s a lifelong process of becoming.
And for me, it all started with this book.
Favorite Quote, Insight, & Principle
Quote: “At the conclusion of all our studies we must try once again to experience the human soul as soul, and not just as a buzz of bioelectricity; the human will as will, and not just a surge of hormones; the human heart not as a fibrous, sticky pump, but as the metaphoric organ of understanding.”
Insight: The black widow spider and the praying mantis have found a way to have their males and eat them, too.
Principle: A great change in life is like a cold bath in winter—we all hesitate at the first plunge.
Author: Melvin Konner
Themes: Patient care, Medical school, Residency, Medicine
3. Biography
Lincoln The Unknown
Summary
Lincoln the Unknown surprised me.
I picked it up with mild curiosity—more of a historical detour than a deliberate destination. A book from the 1930s? Written by Dale Carnegie, better known for How to Win Friends and Influence People? I wasn’t expecting much.
But by the end, I was moved. Genuinely. Deeply.
This book taught me more about Abraham Lincoln—and the Civil War era—than I could’ve anticipated. Not just the big, sweeping history, but the human side. The inner world. The quiet suffering. The slow formation of a man who would go on to carry the weight of a fractured nation on his shoulders.
Carnegie doesn’t write like a historian. He writes like a storyteller. And what he gives us in Lincoln the Unknown is not the icon, not the monument, but the man. A man who endured heartbreak after heartbreak. A man who grew up with almost nothing. Who lost his mother young, who fought through crippling self-doubt, depression, and failure—and still kept going. Still kept believing in something bigger than himself.
Reading this made me realize how little I actually knew about Lincoln, beyond the basics. And more than that, it sparked something in me. It made me want to read more about the Civil War. About leadership in times of darkness. About how character is formed not in comfort, but in pain.
This isn’t a textbook. It’s not trying to cover everything. It’s from a different time—yes, written with the tone and framing of the 1930s—but the heart of it is timeless. It shows us Lincoln not as a legend, but as a human being. And somehow, that makes his legacy feel even more profound.
For anyone who enjoys history—or wants to feel closer to one of the most important figures in American life—this is an outstanding read. Short. Accessible. Strangely intimate.
Lincoln the Unknown doesn’t just tell you about a president.
It reminds you of what’s possible when a person decides to keep showing up, even when everything hurts.
Favorite Quote, Insight, & Principle
Quote: “The little advance I now have upon this store of education, I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.”
Insight: When I do good, I feel good, when I do bad, I feel bad, and that's my religion.
Principle: One of the most valuable assets any man can have, even from a university education: a love of knowledge and a thirst for learning.
Author: Dale Carnegie
Themes: Biography, History
Legacy doesn’t begin when we’re gone. It begins with how we show up—right now.
Charlie White lived 109 years, but what made his life extraordinary wasn’t its length. It was how fully he stayed present to its lessons. Melvin Konner became a doctor not through the rituals of training, but by confronting the weight and wonder of what it means to care. And Abraham Lincoln—lonely, self-taught, haunted by grief—led not because he was fearless, but because he dared to carry the fear with integrity.
Three very different men. Three legacies shaped not by grand gestures, but by showing up, again and again, with purpose.
And maybe that’s the through line—what connects the auditorium in Hightstown to the White House to the trauma bay.
Legacy is not a moment. It’s a practice.
It’s the daily choice to lead with character, to stay curious, to lift others up, even when no one’s watching. It’s realizing that you don’t need to be extraordinary to leave something lasting. You just need to be consistent in what you value, in how you serve, and in who you become.
We don’t get to choose the hand we’re dealt. But we do get to play it with intention.
And that, more than anything else, is how we’re remembered.
Always ❤️📚💡
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