There is a story that I talk about a lot when I'm teaching implant dentistry, and it's the story of David Beckham scoring that free kick against Greece.
Beckham stands up after having ran the whole game that day and score's a free kick in injury time that sends England to the World Cup.
The story is not really about the free kick; it's about the years it took to manufacture that free-kick; it didn't take a second; it took decades.
That story of that free kick is so beautifully told in Bounce by Matthew Syed, where he explores the talent myth and the concepts around that theory, Beckham's practise of keeping the ball off the ground, and the 'keepy uppys' when he was 7 years old, he could do five keepy uppy's when he was 9, he could do 2005, and he turned his attention to free kicks.
He found a bit of wire on the edge of a shed, and he would hit the ball off that wire for hours and hours until his dad came home to play football with him. That piece of wire was the free kick against Greece; it was preprogrammed into his brain.
What I talk about when I'm teaching implant dentistry is that I can teach people the theory of implant dentistry all day long, but it doesn't make them any good at doing implant dentistry.
David Beckham doesn't know anything about the science of that free kick, nothing about compression physics or aerodynamics, or what a parabola looks like, or how gravity impacts on the ball, or friction, air resistance, or any of that sh*t; he knows how to take a free kick because he practised. Implant dentistry is the same; you need to know some theory, but you need to practise, and the funny thing is, the business is exactly the same.
You can go off and do 7 MBAs if you like and read all the business books under the sun, but until you smash into reality at 100 miles an hour, you've no idea what's actually going to happen.
And so that's where we need reflection, and that's where we need to understand that sometimes our personality type is not suited to certain aspects of running a business, and we need help we need to bring in some superheroes to help us when we don't have those superpowers, and we need to understand the complexity of personality and why different personalities react in different ways.
Fundamentally though, and at all times, we're making things up and learning on the job and reflecting and adapting and improving and then years later, many years later we became an overnight success in decades just like that free kick.
'Ready, fire, aim'.
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