Noh Filter (Friday’s with Ada Noh, OD)
True Grit
Grit is easy to romanticize when you look at a business from the outside. What people don't see is what it takes to build a cold start—especially a specialty practice where you're not simply opening another optometry office, but creating awareness for a service patients may not even realize exists. There is no established patient base, no guarantee that the phone will ring, and no roadmap telling you exactly what to do next. You have to keep showing up when the results are slow: refining your message, educating your community, building referral relationships, figuring out the operations, making uncomfortable investments, and sometimes questioning whether you're doing any of it right. Grit, to me, isn't about blindly pushing through. It's having the willingness to keep going while being honest enough to adjust your strategy when something isn't working.
Building a second practice is already teaching me lessons and I don’t even have a projected opening date. It has also taught me that grit looks different when you've already built something once. The first time, you have the energy of possibility and the comfort of not knowing how hard it will be. The second time, you know exactly how much work is ahead of you—and you choose to do it anyway. There are days when it would be easier to stay with what is familiar, but building a dry-eye specialty practice in a new market requires betting on yourself before anyone else has a reason to. Every patient who walks through the door, every person who refers someone, and every small win is evidence that the foundation is taking shape. Grit is trusting that those small, often invisible efforts compound into something meaningful, even when you can't see the finished practice yet.
From A to Z (Friday’s with Andrew Zagelbaum, OD)
No(ah) Rest for the Wicked
Last Wednesday night, I went to a Noah Kahan concert. In the days leading up to it, there was a decent amount of concern that the show might get cancelled. Noah had announced that he was pretty sick, and I think a lot of us were preparing ourselves for the possibility that it just wasn’t going to happen.
The show went on, and it was incredible. You could tell pretty quickly that he was still under the weather, and he ended up having to skip a few of his more vocally demanding songs. Despite that, he got on stage and performed in front of 50,000 people when I’m sure staying in bed sounded a whole lot better.
At some point during the concert, I started thinking about the days when I really don’t feel like showing up for work. Maybe I’m getting over a cold, something is going on in my personal life, or I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Unfortunately, there’s still a schedule full of patients who have no idea what’s going on outside of the office, nor should they. So you walk through the door, put everything else aside for a few hours, and try to give them the same version of yourself they would have gotten on a better day.
Watching Noah that night gave me a new appreciation for that. Obviously, performing for 50,000 people is a little different than walking into an exam room, but I think most of us know what it feels like to have people relying on us when we’re not necessarily at our best. It happens at work, with our families, with our friends, and in plenty of other situations where calling it a day isn’t really an option.
We tend to notice when other people do it. I certainly noticed it watching Noah perform that night. What I’m probably not as good at is recognizing the times when I’ve done the same thing myself. Not because showing up for work when you’re tired deserves some grand celebration, but because there are days when simply doing what’s expected of you takes a little more effort than anyone around you realizes.
I’ll probably never have the chance to thank Noah for showing up that night, and he certainly didn’t know that some optometrist in the crowd would end up writing about it a week later. I’m just glad he did, because somewhere between the music and 50,000 people singing along, it reminded me that showing up counts for something.
Sometimes it’s for 50,000 people. Sometimes it’s for a schedule full of patients. Other times, it may just be for the one person who needed you that day.
Have a great weekend.
Ada Noh, OD
Andrew Zagelbaum, OD