The second story is from the trip away last weekend.
The line above is from Laura Marling's song Rambling Man.
I wrote a little blog about lessons from Laura in September last year. If you want to connect the dots, it's here.
The first line of Laura's song is written as above: "Oh, naive little me."
I travelled to Oman to tell a story about building a practice and a team, what we've learned, and how you might learn lessons from that to improve your circumstances in business.
The introduction to that is centred around the darkness of building the practice and nearly losing our house in May 2020.
I stood up there, told the story with pride, and puffed my chest out; look at me, aren't I great a survivor, a warrior, look at me, look at me.
I connected with a gentleman from Beirut, Lebanon. I connected with a few of the delegates from Beirut.
We ended up chatting later at dinner, asking about what it was like in Beirut after all the things that happened.
One of the fascinating things from the contingent from Beirut, which were there was their agreement that they were happy to go through the pain to stop the terrorism; they were happy that they would end up with a country on the other side of this, which might be safer and better. That was never what I'd seen reported anywhere else, never what I'd heard.
They also showed me maps they were sent through WhatsApp before buildings were destroyed by the Israelis to warn them to get out of the way.
They told me stories about how their phone rings when they're driving down the road, and it's an Israeli on the phone that tells him to get off the road before a car blows up further down the road (completely, honestly, that was the story). I would never have understood or realised that had I not been there.
The final story, though, the 'Oh, naive little me story' was when Alain, who owns Lounge Dental Clinic in Beirut, told me the story of his practice, but not before he told me how much he admired my story, how inspired he'd been and how it must have been terribly difficult for us (Wait for the punchline).
Alain showed me CCTV from his practice two years ago (he has CCTV in different rooms of the practice).
He showed me a CCTV clip of him in a meeting room with two of his team in the practice at 6 p.m. one evening.
And then the practice blew up.
I watched the footage of the room as the practice blew up.
An Israeli missile had hit a house further down his road and exploded some munitions that were stored in the house, which had then exploded a gas tank, which had then exploded his building which had killed two people (not from his practice), broke the back of one of his nurses, broke his leg and embedded glass in his eyes.
He had spent $2 million building that practice.
His insurance would provide him $190,000 due to the economic situation in Lebanon at the time.
This is one of the guys who told me that he was glad the bombs were falling again because he wanted an end to terrorism, and he thought that this would bring it.
That's his view, not mine. That's what he said, not me.
I had an extraordinary trip to Oman.
I met some extraordinary people: taxi drivers, waiters, cleaners, and domestics in the hotel, high-flying dentists, and all sorts of people from all walks of life, but Alain's story is probably the kicker, isn't it?
Maybe it's time for me to stop talking about building a practice and work a little bit harder to try and be a little bit better, maybe a little bit less arrogant and a little bit less naive.
Blog Post Number - 4015
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