The Dent of Efficiency

A Mini-Eassy On Mining Principles In The Most Unlikely Of Places

Todays essay is a bit different than my other writing. It’s the third and last of the mini-essays I drafted during my Writing Original Works workshop with Nick Milo. The first one was Free To Collect + Allowed To Keep It and the second one was Jumping Through Chaos: How Super Mario Rescued Motivation & Taught Me To Let Go.

I’m still figuring out if this type of post is something I want to continue, as it’s quite different from my usual work. I’d love to hear any feedback you have on this idea.

I’ve got caries.

I know I could’ve prevented this. Maybe I should’ve.

But it’s too late now—my dental flora is forever altered. Some parts are lost for good.

About ten years ago, I started slacking on dental hygiene. Now, I pay the price. Recovering my dental health will be costly. At least eight more appointments at the dentist’s office sit on my calendar.

When the diagnosis came in, it shook me awake. I became much more aware of my teeth. For a while, I became pedantic about flossing, brushing, and elmexing. I’ve settled back a bit, but it’s still more allostasis than homeostasis. I learned a thing or two and permanently altered my dental hygiene — I still regularly floss and use Elmex when I previously wouldn’t.

The other day, as I was sitting in the waiting area, I got thinking. A lot can be learned from dentists about productivity. We can draw numerous analogies between dentistry and our effectiveness and efficiency. For instance, dentists have many different tools, each for a dedicated purpose; imagine if all they had was a hammer. Dentists can also be ruthless, extracting teeth if necessary; they act to eliminate what no longer serves. Successful dentists also use schedules; they don’t treat their waiting room as a backlog but as a buffer. One dentist told me he tamed chaos by introducing appointments. Before, people would drop in. Some still do, but overall, everything is much more smoothed out.

The main job of a dentist is to watch out for and treat “tooth decay.” Caries—as they call it—is the breakdown of teeth caused by acids produced by bacteria. Knowledge workers do something similar. They look out for irritants like friction, duplication, and stale ideas and have to be wary of the decay of their systems.

My caries taught me a valuable lesson about my health. Dentistry, in general, makes for nice analogies with productivity. But underlying it all, I see something even more profound: many things in life are a blessing, even the things you least expect it from, such as caries or sitting in the doctor’s waiting room. Every failure holds something to be learned. Every dumb person you meet can still teach you a thing or two. Every rotten tooth will remind you to up your upkeep.

Digging really deep and trying to understand the underlying principles of things—that’s what makes you smarter. There are transferable truths in the world that, once grasped, can be applied to all facets of life. Simplicity, synergy, and entropy come to mind. And it doesn’t matter whether you learned them in business school or while facing a dentist drilling in your tooth. As soon as you understand them, you level up.

Granted, everything fades from memory if you wait long enough, so you’ll need a protocol to reinforce them every now and then. In the case of tooth decay, two important lessons resurfaced for me: one is impermanence—nothing lasts forever—and another is maintenance—the infinite game of taking care of what we have so that we can have it for longer.

I’ll do my best to leverage my newly raised awareness to benefit my dental health, but also many other areas of life. And I wish you’ll be able to do the same.

Anyway, I’ve got to drop. I need to see my dentist now.