Throughout my life, I have met several men and women that were the living proof of to me the law of Wallace D. Wattles. You do not get rich by doing certain things; you get rich by doing things a certain way. I will now focus on two of the influences that I believe shaped my professional life over the last few years.
There was a Czechoslovakian emigrant who ended up in Hamburg, Germany in his late twenties. He had a pregnant wife of 9 months and was escaping Czechoslovakia. During his younger days, he had restored an art piece in Czechoslovakia but was not allowed to study (he only reached high school) because of the communist regime.
He and his wife did not want to have a family in such conditions and decided to move to Canada. In Germany however they realized that she was about to have a baby and they decided to wait until the baby was born and ended up staying in Germany. The man had to learn German and finish two years of schooling to get his high school diploma recognized, while starting working at the same time. In the meantime, he decided to study veterinary medicine. There was no veterinary medicine university in Hamburg, and as an immigrant, he could not change his place of residence so he decided to go study dentistry instead. He studied during the day and worked during the night, driving pastry, restoring old cigarette machiens and was fighting his way through life. He was so good in restoring the machiens that his boss offered him to stay and leave dentistry. The man declined. At the age of 39 he graduated in dentistry. As an immigrant he could not just start a private practice. So he decided to stay in dental school and work as a clinical teacher (a job nobody wanted). Thanks to his restoring skills, he became a great dentist and his commitment to students made him a great Teacher. Students loved him! A few years later, his former students remembered him and invited him to make speeches for great organizations. He was well remembered and suddenly he became a household name whenever a speaker was needed to talk about prosthetics or restorative dentistry, among others. “Ana,” he told me on the beautiful summer night we spent dining in Barcelona. “Can you believe that I started earning more money per speech than I would earn per month as a clinical teacher in University!”
Oh, how I believed him! But this story does not end here. Around the age of 50, he realized that the prevention in dentistry never had a clear structure, system, and something was not working there. Not long after, he developed a system of preventive dentistry that he started teaching as an extracurricular course, while many of his colleagues were already home, resting from an exhausting day. This program was something else, something innovative. Somewhere around the age of 52, a man heard about him. So here we come to the other person in this story.
This other man was a second generation business owner of a dental depot in Switzerland. The man who had spent more than 50 years in the dental business (around 30 years at the time of the story) and had always been a visionary, a crazy man with even crazier ideas. Moreover, he always had a great hunch bringing people together in order to make something bigger. The day I started looking up to him, I understood why he comes to the office before everyone else and was always the last to leave. It was not about the money. Changing the world was his passion. And trust me, I’ve seen the most skeptical audiences become awestruck when he’d speak about his vision. I then realized that a man with a purpose is the most powerful man alive. Now let me get back to the story.
The Swiss man heard about the Czech dentist in Germany. They met and they spoke a lot about the failures in dentistry and they agreed on a new collaboration, where both would trade knowledge and resources. This was a bold move for both at the time.
What did they accomplish? The dentist helped develop a full set of dental products together with a schooling system for dental professionals that would change the way they work. They created several brands that brought together high quality products and high quality philosophy and education in almost every corner of the world.
Dr Jiri Sedelmayer, once an immigrant, became known worldwide for his work with preventive dentistry, a branch that is not usually profitable, and I am telling you this as a dentist.
Ueli Breitschmid, once a dental businessman, became owner of one of the most growing brands of oral care that currently exist.
So trust whoever tells u that “What’s important isn’t what you do, but how you do it.” Because when you do things a certain way, the universe itself moves to make space for you and what you create.
