Your Success: Are You a Baseline Buster?

We all have what I call a baseline level of comfort and success in life. Whether we are talking about economic success, professional fulfilment, or personal happiness, as long as you maintain things at that baseline level, or even rise above it a bit, life seems good. When things dip below that baseline, there is a sense of urgency to get back on track.

Most of us saw our baseline improve steadily – at least economically – during early adulthood. The life of a student, for instance, comes with many limitations, and many meals featuring ramen noodles, but that tends to improve significantly once you become established in a career.

But then things level off. Eventually you get entrenched in your habits and those habits determine, for better or worse, your baseline. A lot of dentists settle into a routine that accommodates their baseline comfort. They do enough – occasional facility upgrades, reading the journals, keeping up with CE requirements – to keep hovering around that baseline. This is why an $800,000-a-year practice usually tends to stay around that level of revenue, year after year, with incremental growth of 3 to 6 percent. (I use this figures merely as an example.)

Busting Baselines = Success

Every once in a while, though, you see an $800,000 practice make the leap to a million-dollar practice, and the reason that happens is surprising simple: the practitioner is a baseline buster – someone who is not satisfied with incremental change and small victories, someone who wants to continually re-invent him-or-herself as a dentist and always establish new baselines (goals). They are committed to success – professionally, clinically, economically, and spiritually – in a very meaningful and measurable way.

These are the people who don't just take courses here and there; they develop a comprehensive educational strategy for professional improvement. They acquire important new skill sets, which turn into new habits, which ultimately shatter their previous conception of what is good.

It is an important question to ask yourself: Have I seen meaningful, perception-altering growth in the last three years? If the answer is no – if you find yourself performing essentially the same kind of dentistry and hovering around essentially the same baseline of comfort and success – maybe it's time to take bolder measures and discover what possibilities in the profession await you. Maybe it's time to become a baseline buster.


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