We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ankur Gupta. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ankur below.
Ankur, first a big thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and insights with us today. I’m sure many of our readers will benefit from your wisdom, and one of the areas where we think your insight might be most helpful is related to imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is holding so many people back from reaching their true and highest potential and so we’d love to hear about your journey and how you overcame imposter syndrome.
I’ll never totally be over it, and I’m thankful for that. No matter how hard I try, how thorough I am, how conscientious I am about my clinical delivery, there are always times where the result doesn’t match what I had envisioned. As much as I rationally understand that this is just how life works, it always hurts a little. Rather than lament this inevitability, I see it as a positive. If I don’t feel some psychological pain when a procedural fails to meet my expectations, then I may not try so hard to avoid it. If I stop trying so hard to avoid it, then my professional life will go on autopilot, free and clear, but carelessness would inevitably set in. My hope is that the unpredictability of dentistry will always cause me some stress, always driving me to be better, to embrace any innovation or technology or practice that might make me better.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I have distant family members that dropped dead of major heart attacks early in life. They were skinny indian guys in their 40s and 50s, just like me. I was always confused, as they didn’t seem to fit the characteristic of a heart attack victim. I learned that a lot of people with my cultural background possess a particular otherwise insignificant coronary artery that has a more narrow lumen than the same artery in people from other races. The fear of dropping dead early, while my kids were still small, really scared me. So I became incredibly excited about any books, documentaries, and podcasts that centered around lifestyle habits of those populations with the cleanest coronaries. The obsession drove my family to change its diet, exercise, and relationship to stress and sleep. I’m still alive, which is cool, but the unanticipated additional consequence is that I seem to have more juice, more energy, than others my age.
A major part of my professional identity is to speak in human language about these lifestyle and habit changes to anyone who expresses interest in learning.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
1. Patients really don’t care that much about how good of a dentist you are. They care about how sincere you are, how kind, and your ability to treat them like a fellow human, deserving of respect and understanding. They want to know that you’ll listen to them and won’t judge them. Work hard to be a great dentist. Work harder to develop those other skills.
2. Embrace tech. When I graduated dental school 20 years ago, there was no iPhone or Amazon or driverless cars. Tech came along and changed everything about how we do things. For some weird reason, a lot of dentists choose to practice and run their offices the way they did 20 years ago. As a dentist, embracing tech means making your patient experience more efficient, more predictable, more consistent, and you will have an easier time delivering the highest quality dentistry.
3. Your back, neck, and wrists are more important than your checkbook. If being a productive dentist means that your body is falling apart prematurely, consider two things: 1. Make it a daily practice to stretch and strengthen the parts of your body most vulnerable to the wear and tear of being a dentist. 2. Work less. Don’t worry. You’ll probably still be able to afford cool stuff.
Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?
Three books: Atomic Habits has probably had the greatest positive impact on my life in every arena; as a parent, a spouse, an entrepreneur, a healthcare professional, and all of my other personal priorities.
Blue Zones has specifically given me many ideas about how to cultivate my daily routine and habits for the greatest health lifestyle.
Comfort crisis has opened my eyes to how the way we live today, what’s normal, is so much at odds with the way our physiology has evolved and adapted. Even though sitting on my butt staring at instagram for an hour sounds pretty delicious, it is incredibly harmful in a variety of ways. The same goes for our relationship to food, comfort, boredom, death, vulnerability, nature, etc. By the end of the book, I realized that my goal in life, the best path towards sustainable health and happiness, is to be weird.
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Tess Smith photography
