In my line of work, if you want to be one of the geniuses or one of the people who have achieved extraordinary things like a Rob Oretti or a David Nelson or a Rony Jung, you can learn from them.
You can go to them and watch them speak or meet them and ask for advice and all of them would be happy to share their stories and share what has worked and what hasn’t, but you can't copy them, copying someone like that just doesn't work.
They are like a pair of shoes that are made specifically for an individual person, they never quite fit anybody else and their pathway will never quite fit yours.
You have to follow your own way and you have to make it up as you go along based on the circumstances you find in front of you and the information that you've gained.
It's like the happiness quest, isn't it?
Everyone's happiness is different, and everyone's version of success is different trying to model someone else's happiness or someone else's success usually leads to unhappiness and disaster in the success chase.
When I was 28, I was the chairman of the local dental committee in Nottingham.
It was a stuck-up, bureaucratic, boring committee full of old dentists who were miserable and bitter about how much money they were or were not making.
There were some good guys there but in general, it was not the type of place where I ever thought I would find myself.
I was one of the youngest LDC chairman’s that anybody could ever remember and in one of the summer meetings in June or July it was boiling and so I wore a pair of shorts and a T-shirt to chair the LDC meeting.
It seemed at that time from the reaction from everybody there that it was so far out of left field that I had done a terrible thing, but it made me want to wear shorts to every LDC meeting because whether I wore shorts or whether I didn't wear shorts made no difference to the outcome of the meeting.
For some reason, I remember that years and years later and I think about it quite regularly.
Only a few years after that we were on holiday at the caravan in Italy and my youngest daughter and middle child, Rosie, was warm. We were trying to potty train her, so she was running about as a little toddler with nothing on as she was warm so, she decided to sit in a bucket full of water.
We have a picture of Rosie sitting in a mop bucket with a smile on her face because it was absolutely the most natural thing in the world for a little warm toddler to sit in a bucket of cold water when the weather was hot.
It made me think about wearing shorts to the LDC meeting.
Years later and recently I would watch Simon Chard lecture at a Denplan event in Birmingham as he showed pictures of an immediate full arch case that he had done under mentorship in his clinic.
My first reaction was to think how dare you present the case when you've only done a very few of these to a group of practitioners who may want to take on your treatment or your system or your scheme.
Then I realised that was exactly what I was doing in 2000 when I presented my first ever immediate full arch case to a group of dentists as part of an ITI meeting, a case that I had treated only a matter of weeks before.
What we need to write our laminates is a fusion of what it was like when we were young and what it will be like when we're old.
We need reckless abandon and experience and cynicism, and we need to understand that while we can learn from every single person we meet, they can never write our laminate and we can never copy theirs.
Blog Post Number - 3339