Today I'm in Inverness.
It's crazy.
I've been invited by the Highland Dental Plan Group to do a lecture on entrepreneurship in dentistry (with a little bit of clinical stuff about Ridge Preservation and Digital Dentistry).
What an enormous privilege.
Some of my earliest memories of my life are travelling in the back of a car with my brother, with a caravan on the back, driving from the West Coast of Scotland to Dornoch. That was it. That was our holiday, 2 weeks in a caravan in Dornoch that we towed behind us, in those days, it took 7 hours to get there.
There's a bridge in Inverness to the Black Isle, called Keswick Bridge. It wasn't even built when I was going there as a boy, on another occasion with my own kids, we stopped there and saw dolphins in the Firth. There's another bridge on the other side of the Black Isle. I stood on it with relatives while it was being built.
Dornoch's my spiritual home, I've always said it's where my ashes should be scattered after I'm gone. I was even a member of the golf club at Dornoch for years (the most extraordinary golf club in the world), and so to be invited to the Highlands to speak to be paid to speak – fu**ing crazy, man.
Imagine this was your job?
That's a phrase that we use a lot at our work now, when we're doing this extraordinary cool stuff. Trying to help other people, trying to share what we've learned, the mistakes that we've made, the stuff that we've seen, it's growing arms and legs.
The talk on Friday is about entrepreneurship. It won't attract a ton of people, but the fact that it's even being talked about in the Highlands is a demonstration of how far the business education thing is going.
I always imagine there's a line in the country that extends from South to North. When new ideas and new practices come, they travel up, not down. It takes a while for things like ‘composite bonding’ to hit Inverness or aggressive selling in aligner dentistry, same for Belfast too. It's a different world, better, deeper, generally happier.
The huge bun fight that occurs in the centre of London or even in Cheshire doesn't happen there, but then neither does the advancement into things like the business of dentistry.
And so this will be the first time I've ever spoken this far North (Aberdeen was the closest before this). I truly hope it won't be the last, but everything's a job interview, isn't it?
It'll only get us back if I'm good enough.
Blog Post Number - 4474
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