Do You Think Big, Or Think Small?

I’ve been trying to remember who made the following statement:

“It takes the same effort to date a guy with money as it does to date a guy with no money, so I choose to only date guys with money.”

Or words to that effect.

I’m not sure whether it was Joan Rivers, or Joan Collins, or Joan of Arc…

In a similar vein, I do know that it was Donald Trump who said, and is quoted:

“If you’re going to think, you might as well think big”

And truth be told, small thinking and a small minded mentality can hold you back, can kill off opportunity, and seriously affect what happens to you and how much success happens to you, in your life.

In dentistry, it takes the same amount of time and the same amount of effort to tell a patient they need a crown on their tooth as it does to explain to them that you can patch their tooth up and see how it goes.

And it often takes less time to present a comprehensive restorative treatment plan to a dental patient than it does to present a detailed tooth by tooth patch up plan.

I quickly learned that most times that I tried to explain a treatment plan in detail to a patient, the patient’s eyes would start to glaze over as if I was speaking to them in double Dutch.

I found that knowing what to say, and how to say it simply and effectively to patients made things far easier for those patients to receive the dentistry that was best for them.

And patients really do want what is best for them.

I consider myself to be a fairly smart person, but I don’t really know and understand how when I flick a switch at home, how the electricity flows from a pole in my street and into my house and makes a light glow so that I can see… but I’m sure glad that I know that I do need a certain number of those lights in my house so I can read comfortably, and move around the rooms without tripping in the dark on the furniture.

So I’m the kind of person who doesn’t need a physics lesson from an electrician every time I go to buy a light globe…

It’s the same when I buy a car. I don’t care what processes actually take place to make the car move [be it by petrol or by electricity]. All I really want to know is how fast does the car go and how smart does it look.

And dental patients are much the same.

Although these patients do not have a dental degree, some dentists feel that they [the dentists] need to give each patient a full dental education before they can tell them about their impending dental treatment…. when a lot of the time all the patients really want to know is how good will they look, or how long will this treatment last, so that they don’t need to come back and have it re-done and re-done.

The real problem is that most people are conditioned to think small and play small.

Even when we are dealing with big numbers, we often still behave with a small-minded mentality. Like I said, it takes the same amount of work to tell a patient they need a crown as it does to explain to them they need a patch-up job. So you might as well do the work that gets the patient the result that lasts a lot longer for them, because you know that a patch-up will never be good enough.

Interestingly, I grew up in a working class neighbourhood. I didn’t have friends whose parents were rich. I didn’t know any business owners. It was all small-thinking people living there….

Fortunately for me something changed in my thinking…. I know that when I started to think bigger, that big things started happening for me.

I know that since then whenever I have lapsed back occasionally and played small [on the very rare occasion] it has cost me. Playing small can cost you more money and hold you back than you would really care to believe.

When you stop thinking small, you will stop playing small.

In reality, it makes sense to always think big anyway….

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