In his excellent book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King addresses the phenomenon of writer’s block. He says, “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” I agree. I’ve written thousands of pages of content, spread across ten published books, scores of special reports, articles and hundreds of marketing, management and leadership programs for dentists and orthodontists, several of which have been translated into at least five languages, that I know of. And, I can attest that a lot of it has typographical and grammatical errors. Some of it…
Monthly Archives:August 2022
Before the 2021 Rose Bowl, Alabama Coach Nick Saban had quite an answer when ESPN’s Tom Rinaldi asked him for one thing he learned this disruptive year. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to keep everything in some kind of a controlled mechanism that I thought was going to lead to better performance, better production, more consistency, and this year, that hasn’t been possible,” he said. “There was a time, in my career as a coach, I would have never been able to tolerate some of the things we’ve had to go through. So that has made me better, I…
A few months ago, one of our private clients reached out with a human resources challenge. I swiftly recommended he call Sean Barnard, our trusted HR expert and certified professional in this area. Sean has decades of experience building, leading and managing high-performance teams and was a general manager tasked with generating $250 million in revenue each year for a tremendously-successful and highly-regulated casino. A task he surpassed brilliantly, year after year, until he retired. At his peak, Sean had over 1,600 employees. This is someone we can all learn from. Sean and I have become close friends over the years. He’s helped…
Maria Konnikova holds a Ph.D. in psychology. She writes about her research on how quickly people make up their minds and how unwilling they are to change them. She’s a New York Times best-selling author and also a world-champion poker player. For her latest book, The Biggest Bluff, she trained with and then competed against some of the best poker players in the world. They taught her to question every hand. She learned to unpack every strategy and pushed herself out of her illusions–beyond her comfort zone–and she won. Konnikova’s research is so fascinating because it flies in the face of what we…
In his review of the new book, How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower’s Biggest Decisions, David Roll shares what is known about the evening before a critical World War II invasion, when General Eisenhower visited the 101st Airborne Division at Newbury, a town in the south of England: “This was the unit whose glider forces and paratroopers, Leigh-Mallory had predicted, would suffer roughly 70% and 50% casualties respectively during the invasion. A famous photo depicts a cluster of soldiers, their faces blackened with charcoal for camouflage and to protect against glare, as they gathered around Ike. Up close, he asked…
Most people, particularly dentists and doctors, need way too much information and are paralyzed by and can’t move forward because of the misconception that they must wait until the time is perfect to move. If you have 80% of the information you need to make a decision, you probably have enough and you should pull the trigger. The key characteristic or defining hallmark of my decision making skill and the ability to navigate and move my company forward has been that I haven’t waited until the time seemed perfect, but instead I’ve waited until the time seems right and I…
Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of one of my favorite magazines, The Idler, said, “To solve the right problems for your patients, customers, clients or donors, you just need to step outside and pay attention to what is so commonplace, so everyday, so mundane that everyone else misses it.” He’s right, but how can orthodontists pay better attention to what their competition misses? First, through clarity. Einstein said, “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.” Wise words from an incredibly wise man, but most orthodontists fail to…
When the big stack of mail gets plopped on my desk each day, I won’t lie, there are many letters I’d prefer not to open. When I see a return address from an attorney or the IRS, I react with as much gleeful anticipation as a toddler sitting in front of a very large bowl of steamed broccoli. It’s on these days that a hand-written thank you card from a Burleson Seminars member shines through like a ray of sunshine. I receive a lot of these cards, which I attribute to the caliber of our member doctors and not the…
Ideas come and go. Every day, I write down a handful of new ideas in my planner. I’ve done this for years. I try to write down at least ten, not because any of my ideas are all that great, but because it gets me in the habit of seeing ideas come and go. Also, it doesn’t hurt to capture what’s in my head. Occasionally I will stumble across something really interesting and my only hope of remembering it is to write it down. I’ve read the biographies of too many great thinkers, writers and comedians who keep journals or…
In his classic text, M.R. Kopmeyer teaches, “push your wheelbarrow upside down.” Walking through life with your wheelbarrow right side up allows anyone to dump their burdens, worries and issues into your wheelbarrow, making your load heavier to carry. When people see that there is a man going around collecting problems, they will easily add their problems to his load. Kopmeyer wasn’t teaching people to be indifferent to the burdens of others, but to be selective. Only by being selective can we be effective. You were not appointed Chief Problem Solver of the Universe. You are not even the President…
