Today is our Learning from Failure conference at The Campbell Clinic. It's the fourth Learning from Failure conference we've ever done since, I think, back in 2017 or thereabout.
There are some absolutely astonishing speakers on this, but there's not the most amount of interest for people to come. Everywhere else that you go, people will tell you that everything they do is full and successful and brilliant, but to be honest, learning from failure is a difficult one to sell to people.
“Would you like to give up your Saturday with your family and a little bit of money to hear people speak about things that went wrong and how they overcame them?” Maybe we need to take another direction with this later.
When it gets to this, I remember that this week I wrote a blog about In It to Win It. You have to be in the game. We have to continue to try to tell the story that it's OK for things to go wrong and to learn from them and to move forward, because we all need to remember that and understand that as often as possible. And also, when I set up the Campbell Academy, the goal at that stage was just to be able to invite amazing people to speak close to my house, so that I didn't have to travel (and pay to travel) to different places to go and see them.
Sticking by that philosophy and all the work that we did at the Riverbank in Nottingham before we built our own facility, we've had the most extraordinary people come and visit and talk to us, to learn from. These have spanned all aspects of society, from some of the biggest and best names in implant dentistry in our world, to business speakers and inspirational speakers.
We had Eddie the fu***ng Eagle last year, for God's sake.
This year, the speakers are extraordinary again. Martine, who is our keynote speaker, lost her legs in the 7/7 bombings and went on to become a part of a Paralympic volleyball representative for GB in the London 2012 Olympics. That is quite a sensational story — I can't wait to hear her.
Louis will speak, too, and Louis's story is entirely interlinked to mine.
Louis will talk about what happened to him that day, over 9 years ago, when he lost his dad by the side of the road in Mallorca.
I don't know what Louis will talk about, but that day our paths became inextricably linked together, and they still are. Louis is going to talk about how that changed him and how he dealt with it; that in itself would be worth 100 times the entry fee.
Chris will talk about things that went wrong in dentistry, Dom and his journey from failure to success. Extraordinary people talking about extraordinary things.
It feels like we don't have enough time in our lives for this — we don't have enough space as we run around with our nose stuck right on the grindstone. Not for me, not tomorrow.
Maybe it'll be the last LFF we do. I hope not, because people talk about it when they've been there and tell us how it's changed them. Maybe we just have to try harder to stay in the game.
Blog Post Number - 4355
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