The lead picture associated with this blog is the standard deviation curve.
It's one of the fundamental philosophical bases of education in The Campbell Academy (and I would say any academy).
Basically, the graph measures capability or ability in any group that you care to measure, and the standard deviation curve is standard, so when you measure any group, the bottom 10% will be unacceptable in their competency, and the top 10% will be exceptional. In the middle, there's the 80% who are ‘just competent'.
The funny thing about the middle 80% is that they look after the the majority of people within their group (think dentists treating patients), the thing here is that the exceptional guys are rubbish at training because they can't understand why you and I are not exceptional, the people who are unacceptable can be helped into the competent group as people in the competent group fall back in to refill the 10%.
The basis of all of this, though, is knowing what you don't know, because that's what allows you to get better, that provokes a certain sense of anxiety about the need to get better, and therefore it prompts you to become better.
This is a crazy phenomenon when you think about it, but it does actually work.
In the introduction for one of our delegates on the Dental Entrepreneurial Bootcamp this week, he basically said, I just want to find out what I don't know. That is a wonderful place to start an education. Over 5 days of dental business exploration, everybody in the group found things that they didn't realise they didn't know.
That's the same for all of us. That's why it's so important that we continue to keep learning, because to assume that we've made it and that we're there is a degree of complacency that will inevitably lead to catastrophic failure.
All of us have a bucket of things we don't know that we don't know. The best way to address that is to be open about what you thought you knew and then take the advice from people who have made more mistakes than you.
The Dental Entrepreneurial Business Course was the most successful edition of this that we've provided to date. So successful that we're putting another cohort on this year, if you'd like to be part of it (and I promise that it is extraordinary). We would like to see you there. Click here to find out.
See you down the road.
PS. If you want to know what the icons are on the graph, then hit reply, and I'll do another blog about it.
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