My friend Dave Rosani and I joke about this. He's a periodontist, one of the smartest guys I know in periodontics and in New Hampshire. He says, "You know why we do the right thing, Mike?" He goes, "Because it's the right thing."

There's a little irony in that. Doing the right thing all the time is a habit. Do you ever feel like not doing the right thing? Like, you know, eating an extra bowl of ice cream or maybe taking a sticker off an item of clothing and putting on another sticker that's a little cheaper? I mean, I see people do this all the time, trying to get away with things. Walking out of the store, and they forgot to charge you for something—do you walk back in and tell them, or do you go, "Oh, I got away with it"? Maybe you got a check at a restaurant, and they didn’t charge you for the extra drinks you ordered.

So why is it important to do the right thing all the time? Because it sometimes catches up with you, and it may catch up in ways you're not even aware of. It may happen deep inside, psychologically. It may affect the way the world reacts to you.

I'm a big believer in this. I believe that what you put out into the world comes back. So I think doing the right thing is actually a very selfish thing because my life is always better when I do the right thing. I was recently in an airport, and I fly out to Toronto at least once a quarter. It's a difficult airport sometimes because I fly Air Canada, and with the weather and everything else, there are often a lot of cancellations. My flight was canceled. I had no ticket back, and I walked up to the counter, and the guy was in a really bad mood that day. I asked, "What do I do?" He goes, "Gate 78." So I walked down to gate 78, and there was a miserable man in front of gate 78. This was right at the end of COVID, so they still had the plexiglass there.

The man was hunched over. He didn’t have one mask; he had two. He was doing the double mask thing. His posture was bad, and he was angry. He was pointing at the window, wanting to get on, but the people weren’t reacting to him. I had the same problem—I missed my flight and wasn’t going to get on. So I asked, "Is there any chance I could get on the next flight out?" The man turned around, printed a ticket, and handed it to me. It was first class. Was I being particularly nice? No, but I wasn’t putting out any bad karma. And I find this happens over and over again. The opposite also happens. When I walk into Starbucks in a bad mood, I end up standing in line for a long time before they pay attention to me. It’s just the way the world works. Having good habits is important.

I’m going to tell you a story about a patient of mine named Hans, which I wrote about in my book. It was my first year in practice, 1985, and I was in a lot of debt. I had debt from school, had taken out a loan, and had just built a new office. I had no patients and started cold in a town with five periodontists. My town’s population was small, but I opened up there because it was where I wanted to be—my hometown, near where I went to high school, and where my parents still lived. By June, six months into practice, I wasn’t very busy. Hanson had gone through scaling and root planing, and I told him he needed periodontal surgery to eliminate the pockets. Hans said he would do it if needed, but he’d rather wait until next year when his insurance kicked in. He said if I told him it was necessary now, he would go ahead.

Periodontal surgery isn’t life-threatening. At that point in time, I call it my Hans moment. I told Hans we could wait until January. I wanted to do it now because I needed the money, but I chose the right thing and told him to wait until January. About six weeks later, Hans, who was 48, died of a massive heart attack. I didn’t know he was sick, and neither did he. He could have had that heart attack while I was operating on him, or I could have pushed for surgery, and he could have died afterward. I would have felt terrible. I feel my life works better when I do the right thing, even when it’s not always expedient, and that has become a habit.

It’s a habit taught to me by my dad, Jay Sonick, who used to say, "One man with courage makes a majority." He told me, "You have to do the right thing, Mike, even if you’re the only one doing it." How does this relate to dentistry and our practice? The reality is, not all of us always do the right thing. It takes commitment, and I can’t overemphasize the importance of doing the right thing all the time. We're in a business. We get paid for what we do, and patients trust us, even though that trust has eroded over time.

So here’s some business advice: Tell the truth and do the right thing. You’ll be swamped with patients looking for you to be the gift to them. This has worked repeatedly in practices that treat patients kindly, with dignity, and with honesty. And honesty is always the first step. Have a great day, everybody. And remember, be the gift.