2021
As the year starts, look in the mirror and ask yourself this question:
“If this year was the last year of my life, would I be doing what I am about to do?”
The question is a reminder of the value of your time, the value of your attention, the value of your presence. It’s a question to help you realise that you need to live fully and make the most of this instant.
If the answer is yes, then awesome, have a great year.
….If the answer is no, then it may be too intimidating for you to think through and work out why.
If your working year ahead looks like a long slog, earning money for an ungrateful boss, treating patients who reluctantly see you out of obligation, and you are made to feel undervalued, not respected, and the rewards simply don’t arrive, then…well it’s time for a change. Living for the weekend is not living well at all.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was to ‘STOP waiting for change; it’s never coming. You have to make it happen.’
Ok….but it’s much easier with help. I get help all the time. Literally every day. Help from my family, help from my business partner, help from colleagues, help from online mentors.
I cannot begin to describe — let alone quantify — the advantages of help from high-value people.
So here is an offer of help to start the year well. This message, and a few others, came to me from James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits.
It is how he outlines his business strategy, and we were asked to curate it for our industry, i.e. being a dentist. Here it is in monthly planner form!
January: Create something useful.
Useful things are valued by other people (patients). If what you create doesn’t deliver value to your patient, don’t do it. What does the patient value? Try to fully think this through by the end of January. List these values and work out how to bring them into each patient interaction.
February: Create something timeless. The more evergreen your work, the longer timeline you have to find success.
Compassion, emotional intelligence, clinical excellence, honesty and authenticity are all timeless characteristics of successful dentists. You don’t need them all, but you need some…pick one or two and nail them down!! Let us know if you want guidance on how.
March: Optimise your time before money. The most important question is, how do I want to spend my days? Make as few choices as possible that violate your answer.
This means quality over quantity. Targets centred on quantity are useless without quality. We may have ordered 140 million vaccines, but if they don’t work no-one cares.
The UDA system is appalling. It is fundamentally a massive nationwide quantity target. Dump it like a toxic lover and do not ever reply to its desperate texts asking for another chance.
April: Build assets that compound; and eliminate problems, responsibilities and obligations that compound. Your private practice should feel easier to sustain and enhance each year.
A good nurse is a massive asset that will improve evermore, as they are part of your clinical network and a mentor. Bad nurses are a problem. There is just no getting away from it. They are unquestionably a terrible disadvantage to you.
Your reputation is either a wonderful compounding asset or a terrible compounding problem. This comes back to value. Not monetary value, I mean human values. Values of character. A good set of values, authentically displayed along with clinical competence and your reputation, becomes an amazing catalyst for a wonderful private practice career.
May: Optimise for reach over revenue.
Put your emphasis on solving problems for other people. People don’t want to get ill. They don’t want to need extractions. No young child ever dreams of having their own denture one day!
Money is made by solving problems for other people. The bigger the solution to a given problem, the higher the monetary value. Fix and prevent people’s dental problems — the money will follow with almost 100% correlation with how good you are at this.
June: Be patient — think longer term than anyone else in other local practices; but be impatient — don’t let a day pass without doing something that contributes to your long-term dental career and helps you create more value.
Continuously ask yourself “What is the highest-leverage thing we can do right now?” Then spend at least 2 to 20 minutes each day working on that thing. It may be learning painless LA techniques or upper six access cavities, or meditation, anything!
July: Reduce the scale but not your standards.
Aspire to do exceptional work and apply that standard to everything in your dental surgery. In the long run, your brand is the quality of the work you do. Sacrifice quality anywhere and you sacrifice the brand, ergo you sacrifice yourself.
August: You get good at drawing pictures of horses by practising drawing pictures of horses.
Do the work. Minimise as much as possible doing the bullshit — i.e. the feel-good, well-intentioned but useless pre-work that fills the calendars of most people. Your actions and behaviour are how the world perceives you. You may consider yourself an ok person, but if you act like a standoffish unfriendly prat then that’s who you are in the eyes of everyone in existence. Stop thinking and start doing. Too many people think about improving, kidding themselves they will one day — when the weather is better, when they have had better sleep, after their birthday, when the kids go back. SHUT UP! Do it now. No excuses. Now, now, now, NOW!
September: Build a team of exceptional people, recruit exceptional employees, work with exceptional partners.
Seek to work with only the best and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: Great people want to work with you because great people already do. Inputs from other exceptional dentists are positive neuroplasticity for your brain that is always net positive. Every input you experience plasticises your brain. All of them. From going to the shops, from listening to a lecture on prepping veneers to watching an action movie. Inputs from other real people are the most potent. Make sure those people are positive.
October: Keep your circle quite small.
Small groups of well-aligned people are the most likely to succeed. The more people involved, the higher the likelihood of divergent levels of industry and disparate goals. The cost of consensus is more expensive than the cost of payroll. Keep a tight group of dentists, nurses, mentors, etc., and work as a team as much as you can.
November: Share your wins with your employees/team.
Get everyone’s incentives aligned. When your professional life wins, make sure your team wins. If you have increasing success, for goodness sake share the successes with the team members you value. Don’t reward the parasites, just exclude them. But make sure your team mates genuinely want you to win tomorrow too.
December: Be easy to work with.
This comes down to emotional intelligence. Nobody really wants to add friction to their life. Make sure each relationship you build is a win for the other side. Win-Win is the only kind of relationship that’s sustainable in the long term.
Call it what you will — your energy, your vibe, your presence attracts and repels in equal measure. The feeling of being around a successful, high-energy person is vastly different to the presence of a morose, unaccomplished moaning pessimist.
And for 2022!!
Reinvent yourself.
Time erodes every advantage.
Evolve, or die.
