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A Voice in the Arena: A Way To Keep Score by Dr. Chad Foster

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Categories: Practice Management, HR and Accounting;
A Voice in the Arena: A Way To Keep Score   

by Chad Foster, DDS, MS, editorial director

When I was in Chicago in April attending the AAO Annual Session, my wife and kids and I stayed with my Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Bill, who live in a wonderful old brownstone in the historic Lincoln Park neighborhood. Bill grew up poor in Chicago with a tough family upbringing. Now 80 years old, he has experienced a self-made career of significant financial success in the commercial heating and cooling industry in Chicago. Whenever I get the chance to share drinks (my vice of choice is usually a strong margarita) and perspective with someone further down the road than I am and someone who has lived a big life like Bill, I always find it a treat not to be missed.

In those conversations, we reflected on many things, but a few in particular stood out. We talked about the love we have for our families and the pride we both experience in providing financial security for them. We agreed, for better and for worse, how that pride becomes a part of who we are, inseparable from our core identity and ego. Bill said one specific thing that I believe will stick with me always: I asked him at what point is “enough enough,” or at what point there starts to be a relative decline on the freedom and happiness that pursuing more wealth can return. Bill told me that for someone like him, a competitive and driven personality type who had to fight and carve his own path to wealth from nothing, the drive doesn’t stop and “money just becomes a way to keep score.”


What about the unquantifiable?
Keeping score can be an addictive thing to driven and overachieving personality types (orthodontists included). Keeping score allows us to have immediate, objective and tangible confirmation of where we are on whatever unique paths of meaning we’re progressing along. We’re constantly thirsty for that hit of confirmation.

Some paths are ready-made to be kept score of. In physical training, it might mean hitting a personal record (or at least maintaining a baseline). In financial goals, we might get that hit from routinely checking our practice or investment metrics/apps. But some meaningful paths aren’t set up for immediate progress comparison so easily: How do you quantify what kind of a spouse or parent you are? Or what your default level of stress versus happiness is? What metric measures fulfillment in your creative self-expression? The list of “scoreless” paths of meaning goes on and on.

For all of us—and especially for orthodontists like me in the first half of our careers—there’s no need to wax poetic about the mystic meaning of money; it is absolutely necessary to set up the life ahead and to meet our goals along the way. It is important. But for all of us, like Bill, there comes a point where the pursuit of more just becomes a way to keep score. If we knew when our own unique tipping point was, where the return on investment of time and energy for money began to diminish, would we reduce our participation in the game? Or, even if we were conscious of that tipping point, by then would the thought of leaving a game we built so much of our life and ego around be too painful to endure?

The truth is that Bill—whether he enjoys the game or whether he’s obligated to continue to play it because it’s what he has built his identity on—has already won many times over. It’s easier to see that when we evaluate the lives of others, but it’s just as true in our own lives, though more di cult to objectively appreciate along the way. But the value in doing so is immense. More important than the prospect of a “higher score” is the freedom to consciously and confidently use the game to craft our own unique lives, rather than being used by the game until our life is spent.

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