She is textbook success.

Her practice, her treatments, her bank accounts, even her successful husband.

Nothing that concerns, motivates, or inspires change is making a dent in this conversation.

Which is the worst place to be in sales.

The “No-Problem” zone.

I stand up.

The conversation appears done.

But as I stand up, she says something I will never forget, and never will forget, moving forward.

“I’m willing to do it.”

….Why?

“Because…

….I love learning new things.”

“It’s exciting to have goals when you’re young.

But then, suddenly, if all goes well and reality exceeds everything you thought was possible, something very counterintuitive happens:

You don’t know what to hope for next.”

The King’s Paradox.

Once you get what you want, i.e.. Becoming a King,  you assume you’ll be satisfied. Free! Yet the more problems in our lives we resolve, the more we still feel we’re...

...insufficient.

We don’t become more satisfied.

We just lowered the threshold for our problems.

The doctor in the above story loved to learn.

She was a student at heart.

The growth she truly cared about was her continued growth in knowledge.

She absolutely did not have to take action to improve her treatments.

But I’ll never forget this meeting.

She taught me that she choose problems based on challenging herself — and most people lower their threshold later in work life, not raise it.

If the problems you are facing today were the comforts of yesterday, take a step back.

Your goal isn’t to ‘escape or live forever like a king.’

Your goal is to design a life filled with challenging projects in which you don’t want to escape from.

This story and (and excerpt) came back to me after reading Jonathan Goodman’s latest book, Unhinged Habits, and from the quote by Dr. Ben Gregg in The Peak Orthodontic Practice who reminds all of us that, “Most things we stress over today don’t deserve the bandwidth we give them.”

Choose the problems that matter to you and continue to climb on.

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