While Christmas and New Year may already seem distant memories, I would like to touch on something that occurred in December and discuss how that event will colour my thinking for 2024.
With a couple of weeks to go before Christmas, an old friend visited me from California. He had left England to go there when he was 18. At the time, he had a dream. He was an excellent water polo player and his dream was to study at a top university in the US with a strong water polo reputation and to achieve this via earning a sports scholarship.
My friend wasn’t satisfied to choose any old university just for the purposes of making the move. He wanted to be the best and to do that he had to look to the most successful university for water polo in the US. To many, a dream at such a high level would have seemed just that; a dream, with the chances of it becoming reality remote. But he was not to be put off. The first attempt ended in failure. He was just not fit and strong enough.
The first rule of achieving your dream is to never give up. So, he returned to England and trained hard every day and worked on his fitness and strength. I remember him working at a mill, heaving great sacks of peas around for hours on end, seven days a week, such was his determination to achieve his dream. The result? One year later he was accepted at the top university for water polo in California and he achieved the prized scholarship.
With his help, the team won two national championships and he was voted the most valuable player in the victorious team. He achieved his dream and went on to marry and have three brilliantly successful sporting children, while living in a wonderful home outside San Francisco with a beach house to relax in. In short, he now lives his dream daily, and is one of the nicest, humblest people you could wish to meet. Why do I tell you all this?
There will be a number of you setting out into 2024 who may have a dream. It may be to achieve a higher qualification in your profession, or it may be more personal than that. For many, especially those at the early stage of your career, it may be that you have become restless and dissatisfied working for someone else.
Maybe you wish to practise in a more clinical environment and the commercial pressures exerted upon you are stifling you, something that is not uncommon. Maybe you have a dream of owning your own business, but feel you don’t know where to start or you are wracked by the fear of failure.
My message to you this month is that you should pursue that dream. There will be those that talk of how hard it is in independent practice and how independent practice is doomed. Funnily enough, most of this sort of language comes from people in the corporate sector. There is no denying running your own business is hard work, but at this point I think of my friend lugging massive sacks of peas up flights of stairs from daybreak for 10 hours a day.
Success is never easy and requires hard work and dedication, but the rewards can be immeasurable, and the happiness that achievement brings is ultimately fulfilling. What is more, you will be in charge of your own destiny and can run a practice in the way you feel will best serve your patients. Can there be a better vision?
Of course, there will be setbacks, but no one said dreams were easy to achieve. Maybe you feel you do not have the skills to run a business. There are many support mechanisms now to help you with this. Why not team up with a business manager from the outset?
Many successful schools use a business manager of some sort to ensure the financial stability of the establishment while the teaching side is overseen by the headteacher, who is trained in teaching not business management, so why would this not work for your dream?
If you have a dream, then let 2024 be the year you set out to achieve it. Do not be put off because living the dream must be the best way to live your life. I look at my friend and see what living his dream has done for him and as a result would testify that all the hard work will pay off.
Do not miss your chance this year. In years to come, you will look back at 2024 as the turning point in your life, just as he does when he looks back to how his dream started. Live that dream. You know you can if you want to.