A few blogs ago, quite a few blogs ago, I wrote about A Squash and a Squeeze, the extraordinary book written by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler.
The concept of the book is that the old woman doesn't think her house is big enough, and she complains that it's too small.
A man appears at the window, and she takes lots of animals into the house. Then she takes them out one by one, and by the time she takes them back out again, she realises her house is enormous. She didn't realise what she had until she didn't have it: a great moral, a great story.
And so, in this month of mine that I've talked about here, which is mental busy (entirely my fault and entirely by design), I'm trying to navigate all the different things that have to be done to get through the month in any sort of successful way amidst the events that just occur anyway, that you don't expect.
One of the biggest things this month is the Beyond Aesthetic Masterclass, which is coming up this Friday.
It's been a huge thing on my radar for a long time, but me being me, I don't really get to the preparation for this until the last week or two (This is much better than it used to be).
And so, what I did is I pushed everything to the side on Thursday and Friday and Saturday and Sunday last week and negotiated with my wife and said, "I'm sorry, I'm going to be a bit absent". I coached the football, I did a little bit of social, and everything else was related to writing these six hours of presentations on Friday.
I was really proud of what I'd managed to achieve by the time it got to Sunday evening; I pulled things from lots of different places, from lots of different people (I have access to the most extraordinary material through my job as Editor in Chief of the ITI Academy) and permission to use things to explain concepts and to help people understand where the world is with placing implants at the front of the mouth to get the best possible results.
I interlinked it with my philosophy of an approach to the treatment of patients, which includes the complexity of the patient and what they need and want, the ability of the practitioner and the procedure that they could undertake. It's complicated this stuff, and it's interlinked with 'prethics' because, really, these days, in order to do the best possible result, you pretty much have to lose money.
Anything is possible; it's just that not everything is feasible.
And so when we got to Sunday night, I felt pretty good; I was at the tinkering stage, just needing to tinker and finesse a few bits of the 323 slides I'd built for which I was massively proud.
I had another lecture to write to this week, my Learning from Failure Conference lecture about building the practice, which will be another hugely emotive thing (I'll probably cry), but I would be able to get started on that on Monday afternoon.
And then we lit the fire, and we sat in the lounge, and for the first time I can ever remember, Alison was working on her laptop, and my daughter, Grace, was marking papers from school, Callum was watching the telly, my daughter's boyfriend was there for moral support, and so, I opened my laptop and decided just to look at the presentation for half an hour only to realise that it wasn't there and it wouldn't open.
I didn't panic immediately; I just thought something was slightly a miss, I must have put it somewhere inadvertently or moved it, but after 15 minutes of searching (and I know how to look for things on a Mac), it wasn't there.
I'd had a few technical hitches in the afternoon, a few daft things were happening where it was autosaving it more times than it should, and then it just didn't exist.
I searched in all sorts of ways, in all sorts of places, until I finally resolved that because it was such a big file, videos, photos, everything that had happened, it just crashed, and my computer was doing something weird. Maybe it's a virus or some other crazy technical hitch.
I spoke to my son Callum about it, who knows about these things. It was gone, and then the blind panic set in.
There are not enough hours in the day literally to get that done again this week; there is no way that I can produce the same sort of quality of presentation from a standing start, so I had a short piece of panic, not telling anybody in the room what was going on. I just moved next door, sat down, took a breath, wrote some notes and started to write again.
Alison came through. I told her that I would have to stay up all night to get back on track with this, so I was a bit down.
All the week that I had planned carefully this week, everything that I was going to do immediately catapulted out the window, and all the additional things that I had or the space to do a little exercise were gone.
And then, after an hour of frantically rewriting the first part of the presentation in an extraordinary panic, I found the original! Ridiculous!
For some reason or another, and I have no doing of mine, it was in the bin.
I had a moment, a flash, I realised I hadn't looked there. I scrolled down and down through it, and there it was. I opened it immediately, went to Callum's room, got a large SD card and saved it. Now, it was off that computer and somewhere else.
But the point was that all of a sudden this week, which was crazy looking mental, wondering how I was going to get through it before I lost the presentation and then realising that it was an unmanageable week of huge stress after I lost it, it looked like the most beautiful thing.
I got up in the morning, walked the dogs, returned, rode my bike, did some strength exercises and stretching, wrote some blogs, had breakfast, did some stuff around the house, and went to work.
I have all the time in the world, and actually, it doesn't matter, does it?
The perspective that I got just from that little episode was extraordinary.
I can't wait for this week.
I can't wait for next week.
This crazy November is turning out to be one of the best months I've ever had.
Blog Post Number - 3995
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