Most of the time, great things are about us, not about you and not about me.
Most of the best work gets done in collaboration with other people who have different skills, different character traits, and different positive attributes than you do.
Most of the time, good work is done for other people, not selfishly for one person.
That's a very difficult concept for many people to accept because the world today pushes us much further towards me than it does towards us.
I arrived at the practice today a little behind time, around 8.30.
It's the first day of our Year Implant Course today, but I'm not teaching on the morning of the first day. I ended up having to get here early due to domestic mix-ups or work that had to be done dropping my son at school because my wife was called somewhere else.
I had to have a shower at the practice and get dressed for later on, but I'm not speaking to the Year Course until this afternoon.
Beatriz Sanchez, who is a genius story of a surgeon who came to the practice eight years ago, having never placed an implant and now runs much of our education, runs the whole of the year course and presents the first part of the year course and introduces it all to the delegates so it would be wrong for me to go in there this morning and present myself in front of them and take over the show (although for someone like me, that is often the urge).
And so I ran in, in my joggers with all my bags and my breakfast and met Paul, one of our new delegates, on the stairs.
I just had to say hi and then leave, and I hope you don't think I was being rude, Paul. It wasn't about me this morning; it was about you and all of you guys and Beatriz.
Delegation is really difficult, and when your name is above the door, it's easy to think that you have to have your hand in everything, but the best work is never done when it's about you; it's always done when it's about us.
It's easy to blink and miss the fact that we're now in the ninth year of providing this course, and this time, we have a waiting list of people who couldn't get on because we've always been strict about restricting the cohort number to make sure that the quality of education is maintained.
We now run two cohorts a year of the Year Implant Course, one in the winter, starting in January, and one later in the summer, but we'll probably be up to our third cohort before too long, and that will be the maximum amount we will provide.
This course is one of the things that I am most proud of, one of the things that The Campbell Clinic and Campbell Academy have developed together in unison in our very precious facility to provide an extraordinary educational experience both face-to-face and in live surgery and an online peer-to-peer environment.
But I'm most proud of it because now I can see the guys turning up for Year three who are friends, who are really glad to see each other and to share the educational journey (it's very unusual to go to the cinema on your own).
And so, for Tom and I's marketing session today, we will do a crazy introduction where we introduce everybody on the course using some material they've given us.
It may sound cringy, but it's in no way cringy and by the end of that and the meal tonight, people will have made friends and alliances that will last them the rest of their careers and lives, and that is at least as important (I think, actually more important) than any of the dentistry they will learn.
This is a very special implant dentistry course, but it is one which is based on complete humanity.
Blog Post Number - 3698
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