Today, I popped into work, even though I promised I wouldn't pop into work, but one of my best friends, Colin Burns, was presenting day two of cohort one of our Year Implant Course for 2025.
I'm unsure now how many cohorts we've actually started, maybe 13; it's a lot, though, a lot of people who turn up for the 1st 2 days of the course wondering if we can make it better, wondering if they can take what's on the course to enhance and improve their practising lives, their patients' lives, their team's lives, their lives.
Way back in the midst of time, maybe 27 years ago or more, I turned up on an evening with the same sort of thoughts in my mind.
I was three or a little bit more years out of dental school; I knew that there was this dental implant thing going on; it was at an Audi garage in Nottingham (which then became the Volvo garage, which then became derelict as I passed it now).
I turned up to see a guy called Jack Richardson, who it turns out was an implant pioneer and legend (God rest his soul).
He did a presentation on how to send him implant patients, but as a little prize for people who turned up, there was a raffle, and the prize for the raffle was a 2-day surgical, restorative course (Think weekend warrior course for those who remember those) in Cambridge.
And so, after winning the raffle and taking a punt that cold winter evening (I think it was November), I travelled to Cambridge after my 3 years of hospital work trying to figure out if I could learn to place these dental implant things.
I already thought I'd missed the boat.
I still have the model in my office of the two dental implants, at least first in a mandible, and that was it.
What had actually happened there is that somebody had chucked a key in front of me and asked me if I wanted to pick it up and it turns out that I did pick it up and I used the key to open doors to take me to better places, to different things, to create a life that I would never have been able to dream of just because I picked up the key.
I chatted to the 16 faces of new people in front of us who've trusted us with a year's worth of straightforward implant education. I told them about the key, and I metaphorically chucked the key in front of them.
I introduced one of my best friends, Colin Burns, and both of us stood in front of them with something like 45 years of implant experience between us, talking a little bit about how the implant dentistry had changed our lives for the better and how we would never be in the position we are now, professionally, personally, philosophically, if we hadn't found them.
We talked about how we didn't want to retire and how we were going to work together for, I don't know how long and how we didn't really get that Sunday night feeling before we went to work on a Monday.
It doesn't matter if it's dental implants, some other aspects of dentistry, or something else in your life, but finding a path to allow you to pick up the key is the only way to secure your happiness moving forward.
Firstly, can you see the key? Almost everyone can, but when you see it, can you pick it up? Can you be brave enough?
I use a slide when I teach almost all the time now. It's two matchstick people, one carrying a box and the other one talking to them. The one without the box says, "What's in the box?" the other one says, "Happiness", and the first one says, "Where did you find it?" The other one says, "I made it myself".
Blog Post Number - 4062
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