I live my life in metaphors.
I am a storyteller!
That is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; it's just a thing.
I have no idea how or why that happened, but certainly, and particularly when I am speaking or teaching, I tell tales and stories.
I never, ever do the same lecture twice. I never really remember what I did the last time I presented a set of slides that was similar to the one I'm presenting now.
I stress and freak and obsess about putting the slides together and then don't even talk about what I was supposed to talk about.
I'll write more about this in Understanding Self, which is a blog that will come out tomorrow.
The metaphors and stories come to me at all sorts of different odd times, but as I was about to sit down and start work today on something else, I had a flash, an understanding, a collection of information that I've gathered over the years, just about the principle and philosophy of what it's like to run a business, or at least to run my business and it's just like parenting.
One of the first and greatest influences in my business thinking was that of Charles Handy, who was introduced to me by my friend and non-blood relative Shaun Reason (father of Tom, our marketing director).
Shaun had been to see Charles Handy speak and waxed lyrical and extolled the virtues of Handy to me and introduced me to his final book, his autobiography (and actually the one which inspired the name of my GDC lecture all those years ago).
In Handy's book, among many wonderful, wonderful insights and teachings, was the insight that parenting is a social experiment.
And so for anyone who is a new parent, if you think there's a laminate or a book (God, I laugh at parenting books so much), then you're completely deluded.
Nobody ever parents the same way that anybody else has done, and parenting is a privilege where you get to make your own mistakes and choices and celebrate your own triumphs.
When you get as far into parenting as I have at the moment (59 combined years with three Children at 22, 20 & 17) and all you can do is look back on the mistakes and the triumphs, wonder if you could have done it differently, wonder if it's worked out OK and continue and go on.
People will tell you that parenting never stops, and at the stage that I'm at now, it certainly feels like that is the case.
I will only be at the end of parenting when my Children have to care for me when I am in my chair, unable to move, reading blogs I wrote all those years ago.
That is the essence of parenting.
We parent until we can't, and then we're looked after by someone else, and oh, my God, that is the same as running a business.
If you ever think you're finished running a business, you're wrong; you're not supposed to be finished running a business.
If you ever think that you have a system for running a business, you're wrong; you're not supposed to have a system; you're not supposed to iron it out so well that nothing ever goes wrong, and you just run on a smooth trajectory to better and richer and happier and working less.
Many, many times when we start the business course or business education at the practice, people talk to me and tell me that what they want is 'passive income', they want to create an 'associate-led business', which effectively runs itself so they can sit back on a boat somewhere else, just counting the money and living on a permanent, all-inclusive holiday.
Yeah, what, just like parenting?
You would never set out in parenting with an exit strategy, never set out to sell your children when they became valuable enough, and never set out to reach a situation where you never had to help them anymore and where you never had to intervene.
Parenting becomes less physically intensive. The older they get, the more self-sufficient they become, but the challenges become greater, more intellectual, and more tiring, I guess.
That, to me, is what happens in business.
I don't see so many patients anymore; I don't grind through five days a week of clinical work, bang, bang, bang, counting off how many implants I've placed, sinus grafts I've done, or any of those things.
I'm long past that stuff; I don't need it anymore.
But the challenges I encountered in my business are deeper, harder, more complex, and more intellectual, and that's totally fine.
I have no intention of giving this up, not anytime soon, as long as my health holds; I have no intention of ever selling my business, and I always say that out loud.
If I could choose now, I would absolutely like to be working 33 years from now, probably just about to enter the last year of my work before I finish the ripe old age of 85.5 and then a few years, maybe just to chill, relax, rest my aching bones and then close my eyes for the last time.
It sounds a lot like parenting, maybe one of the best metaphors to help me understand what I'm doing that I've ever come up with. Feel free to take one and pass it on.
Blog Post Number - 4021
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