I write this blog most days (apart from the weekends that I miss out, like last weekend), and I have one correspondent who replies to me these days more than any other (I have a group of people who respond to me regularly, and I am forever grateful).
He emails me, not comments; he emails. He gives me feedback, comments, and compliments about the blog. He's from Venezuela, or should I say, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and he writes in Spanish.
The first time he wrote to me, I showed it to Beatriz in the Clinic (from Pamplona in Spain) and said to her that someone was writing to me in Spanish, but she read it once and said, no, that's Venezuelan, at least South American, and she was right.
And so, he writes to me, and I translate it and often reply because what he writes is so thought-provoking and helpful.
Mostly, what he writes about, though, is asking me to continue to write, and he wants me to continue to be honest about what I write and to say it how it is, and that's what I try to do in these pages.
The reason I'm writing this today is that sometimes it's just hard, isn't it? When you turn up, and you don't quite feel like turning up, and things don't go your way, and you wonder how good you are or how good you're not, and whether you should be carrying on at all, and whether you can stick your head in a bucket and let everything else go away but of course, when we turn up in our job, we can't do that, and we have to smile, put our game face on and show who we are and what we do.
One day this week was particularly rubbish in that world where 'I love my job every day, but I don't like it every day'.
I'd looked the night before at what I was going to see in Clinic in the morning and realised that a patient I was quite worried about was coming in.
He came, and I took two of his three implants out that were failing (having previously replaced two implants that had already failed) and wondered whether or not I should be let loose on people for surgery anymore or whether my time was done.
I was wide open about this and spoke to everybody, and I got lots of reassurance: maybe there's something wrong with the patient, maybe his thyroid levels are low, his vitamin D levels are low, etc.
I've encountered this many, many times in my career, and at that low point, I wonder whether I'm actually good enough to do the thing that people let me do.
It carried on through the morning, though, and I saw different patients with different difficulties or issues or problems, and you come out of a day like that thinking, 'God, it's hard work and actually, should it not be easier than this?'. I saw cases that day where I looked at things and thought, 'Could I have done that better or did I do it right?'
It carried on to the next day; I had a huge surgery the following day. I wasn't entirely happy with the way it closed up, and I wasn't entirely happy with the way I got it to the finish line, but it was fine. I've done things like this many times before, and we've achieved fantastic results for patients.
But then I wondered how much of my angst, how much of my anxiety around this, how much of my problems are related to what other people tell me they do and how I was creating other people's reality with my privacy.
I've noticed this creeping in on me as I've gone to more and more of the big conferences and big courses that I get to see at the moment where people showcase and grandstand and show me what they've got, and I go back to my place and think 'I'm never going to be able to repeat what they do, certainly not in a repeatable way'.
And then I stepped aside from that, and I realised that's not the point, it's not the point for me, and it's not the point for us here.
And so, for the first time in what will be many times going forward, I'm going to introduce you to something called The Campbell Academy Clubhouse.
This is something that's coming next year, and we're in the middle now of a 3-year process of developing this.
It's a virtual digital thing that's also hybrid; it's an online platform that shares tonnes and tonnes of information, courses, cases, mentoring groups and Zoom calls, but what it is, in its essence, is encompassed in this phrase below.
"Where education meets reality."
If there's one thing I've ever been complimented on (and that would not be very often) on my style of education for people, it's authenticity and reality.
I'm never a guy who's gonna be on the main stage of the World Symposium. I simply don't have the material or the motivation to get the material, but I do have the motivation to try to make a positive difference to people I get the opportunity to speak to, and for that, I want to share things in the real world.
I want to share this like Tuesday this week, it was sh*t, and I want you to know that it's ok to have a sh*t day because everybody has a sh*t day, and I'm gonna show you how we got out of that sh*t day and how you can get out of your sh*t day too.
I think that type of stuff is way more exciting and way more relevant to me than some of the grandstanding that I see all over the place at the moment.
The Clubhouse will be special; it's implants and dental business all in one place, there's grandstand material, it gets updated every week with major updates every month and courses that sit on there that you can access and face-to-face meetings for only people on Clubhouse and also a membership of our buying group.
It's a subscription service that will start next year.
I hope you'll think it's worth it, both in terms of the monetary value and in terms of the collaboration and the discussion and the honesty between each other.
We hope we'll get maybe 200 or 250 people on there, and then we'll probably close it to make it exclusive.
I'd like your feedback if you've read this.
Do you think it will work?
Do you think anyone wants it?
Do you think anyone else needs a safe place apart from me?
Blog Post Number - 4129
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