The Campbell Academy Blog (87)

The Dip

One of the things we talked about at quite some length yesterday on the first day of the Dental Entrepreneurial Bootcamp was the dip.

There's a picture of it with this blog.

Seth Godin wrote a book about the dip, but he didn't invent it. It's been a thing for a long time in almost every aspect of life.

There is an extraordinary publication called Life Launch that details the dips in our lives. Although they don't discuss them in that way, that is actually what they're talking about.

And so, let's set up the context for this.

You start a project or a relationship or a business or a boys football team or an exercise plan or anything you want to name like that and you start at point A.

You're excited.

You know that this is going to be great.

You want to see what happens, and you want to get to the end.

You want to come through the other side of this project better, wiser, richer, healthier, faster, and more lovely. So you start the project, and then you have to do the work, and then it goes down. Enthusiasm dips, cash in the bank dips, and energy levels dip.

It's never quite what you thought it would be until it comes out the other side.

The length it takes you to get through the other side of an investment that requires a dip varies.

Modern business thinking would suggest that starting a business is a three-year process, but I know start-ups that never made it and some that took seven years.

We expect that it will happen quicker than we think, but it always happens longer.

The thing about the dips, though, is that they are ubiquitous throughout all of these types of projects.

And really, it's not something to be avoided.

It's something to be embraced.

Instead of wondering how to eliminate the dip and get from A to C faster (B is the bottom of the dip, whatever that is), maybe it would be better if we sought things that had a dip, knowing that it's the opportunity to get to see knowing it's the opportunity to put in some hard graft or investment to get to a better place.

As always, it's probably about changing the narrative of the dip, not trying to run away from it.