I'll travel to South Africa in about four weeks to speak at the South African National Dental Conference on business education subjects.
I have three sessions to deliver at their national conference, two on the main stage for 45 minutes each and one 90-minute breakout session on other aspects of business education.
I'll fly business class and stay in a nice hotel and be in South Africa with some amazing people for a week.
It's all about glamour, ay?
People will see that, and if it's the only story that I tell, they'll think that my life is just about perfect.
If I had any social media, I could post vividly and wildly through that trip, showing people how great my life was and comparing it to their dull existence as they scrape through, trying to make a place and make a way.
But perhaps if I were to set that against my recent lecturing trip to London (where I talked about flags in the previous blog), it might give you some sort of framework or some sort of foil against the glamour and the glitz that sometimes (but actually very rarely) comes to pass.
Some months ago, I was on a telephone call with my friend and colleague and industry partner Luke Broadhurst from Planmeca.
We love Planmeca and work closely with them because they are a lovely company and brilliant people.
On the call, I asked Luke, "Is there anything you need? Is there any way I can help?".
He told me that they were supporting a dental innovations conference at QMU in the East End of London sometime in July, and they'd be really grateful if I would come and do a lecture.
We agreed (he kindly agreed to pay me), and I put it in the diary thinking that what I would do was travel with Alison to London that day and then speak for a short while at QMU and then go back to central London and we would be able to spend some time together, maybe even see a show, perhaps even stay over!
In the end, that was total pie in the sky, and it was never going to happen, and life was way too busy and mental for that.
When the week started for the lecture, I was trying to put together something that would be great and represent Planmeca and ourselves really well in terms of dental innovation around the tech stack (you can read the blogs about this here) and something that would be innovative and new and different for the people that would be there.
I then saw that my lecture had been restricted to 35 minutes (this was different from what was agreed upon, but hey, it didn't matter).
I then realised that they wanted me to present in PowerPoint. I never present in PowerPoint, and all my lectures are in Keynote, and to convert any lectures from Keynote into PowerPoint completely ruins them.
We asked if I could do it online because that would be innovative. It would be cheaper for Planmeca and cheaper on my time because we'd now realised there was a train strike and I would have to drive now instead of going by train, which would have been much more convenient and much better for me and much better on the work whole thing for that week.
In the end, I had to do it live.
In the end, it got cut to 25 minutes.
In the end, it had to be on Powerpoint.
But that's not the worst of it, because there's still glamour in that, probably because you've been invited to speak somewhere else and you're being paid for it and just because you have to drive in your own car on a Saturday doesn't really matter.
And so, I set off on Saturday morning, but I gave Ibby, who works with us, a lift to Watford, so I travelled to the East End of London from Nottingham via Watford, which was about 3 to 3.5 hours of driving because of traffic and the weather was terrible.
Again, never mind, that's cool.
When I got there, though (I'd had a sense of this before), it wasn't overly busy.
Luke met me outside, and I asked him, "How many people do we have?" he shook his head and apologised profusely.
I said, "Oh, are there 10?" and he said, "There may be a few more than 10".
It had been billed as something which would have had about 150 people there, so it would have been the chance for me to tell people about our online business education course.
It had 400 people booked online, so the audience was big.
It was great for Planmeca, and it would be good for the Academy to let some people who don't know us know about us.
When I actually spoke (the lecture was restricted to 25 minutes, but I actually spoke for 40 because I just ran into lunchtime anyway).
I think there were 15 people in the room.
Of those 15, 3 of us were speakers, one of us was the chairman, and one was the organiser.
Of the ten other people, two were taking photographs, so I think they might have been photographers, but they might have been dentists, too, but I didn't get a chance to speak to them.
About eight were students or new graduates, and that was the room.
Luke got a little bit of relief from the fact that in the digital counter, there were seven people logged in when I was when I started to speak and 50 when I finished, so at least that's a little bit more exposure than 17 people, but it's not a lot more.
I've had to slay the most incredible number of dragons to get the opportunity to speak at the South African National Dental Conference (and it's still possible no one will turn up to hear that).
This is the reality. The truth of speaking
Every so often, you get to speak in front of 1000 people at the British Dental Conference about your GDC case, and you cry. They stand up at the end. Everybody's happy, it's wonderful.
Most of the time, it's hard work and not glamorous.
Blog Post Number - 3518
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