Episode 18-
Dr. Simon McDonald
Dr. Simon McDonald on the Inventors Spirit Pt.1
Today’s guest is Dr. Simon McDonald. He's been described as a "serial inventor and entrepreneur", who has brought a number of groundbreaking inventions into the field of dentistry. You might be familiar with the V-Ring and the Tri-Clip, but his other notable inventions include the One Visit Crown and the Grip Tab.
Simon studied dentistry in the UK at King's College in London, but moved to New Zealand when his first child was still young. He fell in love with the country, and set up his own dental practice there. Through the years, he used the spare rooms in his practice to house the dental inventions he’s created across his career. Like many of the guests on this show, Simon never sits still, and balances his dental practice alongside other projects.
Simon’s inventions have advanced the way that dentistry approaches oral care. This is Part 1 of Simon’s interview, and this episode will focus on his inventive spirit and discuss the countless hours it takes to realize an invention as a reality.
Resources
Follow your curiosity, connect, and join our ever-growing community of extraordinary minds.
Dr. Simon McDonald on LinkedIn
Rhondium Dental Products Website
What's In This Episode
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How Simon found dentistry.
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Why Simon loves inventing better dental products.
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A few entrepreneurs that inspire Simon.
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What it takes to create a truly groundbreaking dental product.
Transcript
Recording:
Extraordinary.
Innovative.
Integrity.
Courageous.
Curious.
Thoughtful.
Brave.
Unafraid.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
There is a place where technology and art meet, where work and play are one and the same. When the threads of curiosity are pulled in this place, the spark of innovation ripples across industries. Those who make this place their home are giants, titans, who pursue creative passion while leaving their mark.
Recording:
Creative.
Flexible.
Brilliant.
Clever.
Confident.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
They are courageous thought leaders set on changing the practice of dentistry and their corner of the world. More than the sum of their parts, we deconstruct the traits that bind these uncommon innovators,
Recording:
Humble, daring, disciplined, playful principled, spontaneous.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
To discover what makes them contrary to ordinary, where we explore the extraordinary. Hi there. I'm Dr. Kim Kutsch, host and founder at CariFree. I'm fascinated by what makes the paradigm shifters, world shakers and art makers tick. Let's embark on a journey. Extraordinary is a place where ordinary people choose to exist. Together we will trek the peaks of possibility, illuminate the depths of resilience, and navigate the boundless landscape of innovation to discover how some of the most innovative dentists and thought leaders unlocked their potential and became extraordinary. On this season of Contrary To Ordinary, we explored the motivations, lives and character of the innovators who see limitless potential around them, the people behind some of the largest paradigm shifts in the practice of dentistry.
Some of the most creative and curious people I've ever met have been inventors. They're the folks who managed to translate dreams into something tangible. It might take years and thousands of prototypes, but they stick at it with vision and purpose. Today's guest is Dr. Simon McDonald. He's been described as a serial inventor and entrepreneur who has brought a number of groundbreaking inventions into the field of dentistry. You might be familiar with the V-Ring and the Tri-Clip, but his other notable inventions include the One Visit Crown and the Grip Tab. Simon is also a talented practicing dentist. He's another one of my guests who has exceptional time management abilities. This is part one of my interview with Simon, a lifelong learner who is always curious about something.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Right now my big topic is endothelial glycocalyx, which I was telling Graham about. But that's a biggie. That's a really important one. If you look at disease, it makes sense to rank problems and deal with the bigger ones first. And so if you do prioritize health issues, cardiovascular disease and circulatory problems, those are number one by far, and we need to understand those things. And there's this thing called the glycocalyx that does appear to be the mechanism of the cause of cardiovascular disease.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
So did six-year-old Simon want to be a dentist?
Dr. Simon McDonald:
No, no. I think I wanted to be a train driver at six.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
That sounds like a lot of fun.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
I used to love-
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
A different type of engineer.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
My grandmother had a house along the railway line, and you could hear the trains coming from some distance. And I'd run down to the bottom of the garden, climb up the fence and lean over and feel the wind rush past.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
And the ground vibrators.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
It was really exciting being quite close to a train when it goes past when you're only small. The reason I chose dentistry was my father had done a degree in electrical engineering, but he moved out of engineering and he moved into human resources, and he was what was called a personnel manager in those days. And he worked for a number of different, quite large corporations, and struggled with all the internal politics that goes on inside those companies.
And he strongly recommended that I got a profession so that if I needed to, I could just work for myself. So he thought I should either become a lawyer, an accountant, doctor, or dentist. And I took that advice on board and looked at those professions. I remember I spent a day with a lawyer, I'd never been so bored in my entire life, so I counted that one out. And I'm so glad I didn't do that. And accountancy, that didn't seem like me. And medicine was excluded because the stupid school I went to, I love science and they prevented me from taking physics, chemistry, and biology. Can you believe it? It didn't fit the curriculum. Can you believe it?
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
No. That's really hard to believe.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
It is hard to believe, isn't it? And I really loved biology, but I thought, well, if I've got to give up one of them, probably I should stick to chemistry and physics. So that's what I did. And I thought that excluded me, but it actually wasn't true. But anyway, with physics and chemistry and maths, dentistry was fine for some reason. But I also had a strong interest in art, but I was umming and ahing about whether to go to art school or whether dental school. But in the end, I thought I'll be practical. At least I can earn a living and do art on the side.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Artists make the most amount of money once they're dead, right?
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Yeah, exactly. I couldn't really see me making a living out of that.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
So where did you go to dental school at then?
Dr. Simon McDonald:
In London.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
In London.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Kings College Hospital.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
So how'd you get from London to New Zealand?
Dr. Simon McDonald:
A woman.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Always a woman.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Yes, a woman. Yeah. So I met Jan, New Zealander, who came over to study osteopathy. And I met her in London and we hooked up together. And then we had two children in London, and she actually lives locally, and she is a very strong-headed woman, and she basically said she was going back to New Zealand, I could come along if I wanted. So I said, "Well, all right, why not?"
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Let's go see a new country.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
So that was basically it. So we came out here for a trip when my oldest daughter was a baby. And I fell in love with the place.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
I'm sure many people have had the experience of looking back at their life and wondering, "How did I fit all that?" In my conversation with Dr. Bobby Birdie, we talked about the idea of long-term and short-term thinking and how we can get caught up in the idea of achieving a lot in a short time. The problem with this is we don't stop to think about how our actions stack up over the longer term. In his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Conneman said that there are two cognitive methods. System one and system two. System one operates automatically and quickly, relying on intuition. It is the fast, effortless, and often unconscious mode of thinking. System two, on the other hand, is slow, deliberate, and analytical. It engages in rational and conscious thought. Ultimately, we need both ways of thinking, but it's good to be reminded that it's beneficial for us to slow down sometimes. But back to Simon, during our conversation, we got onto the topic of his master's thesis, which ended up influencing dentistry in a way that he didn't anticipate.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
I was working in a children's clinic predominantly, in a deprived area of East London, and I was seeing a lot of children that needed general anesthetics for multiple extractions. And I had heard about silver diamine fluoride from this Japanese, and I got some. I got some sent over from Japan, actually. And I started playing with this, applying it to some of these very carious teeth. And I wasn't convinced it worked, but I thought to myself, if it did work, if you could stop the decay, why wouldn't you just put a filling on the top? Just seemed totally logical to me. So I set about doing a study to see whether that would work. So we had a half mouth design, and on one half of the mouth, they got just silver fluoride on its own, and it had stannous fluoride to make it precipitate. And on the other side of the mouth, if it was a suitable cavity, it would have silver fluoride and stannous fluoride, and then a bonding agent and clear fill, which was one of the early composites out of Japan.
And so then I recruited about 50 to 60 children into that study. These children were all destined for general anesthetic. And the average age was four, So I was dealing with little kiddies. There was also another control, which was stannous fluoride only. Now the children got nothing. Only the smaller cavities got topical only, the bigger ones got restorations. What it showed was that if you put the silver fluoride and stannous fluoride on, and then the composite and the composite stayed there, then the caries stopped. And I had numerous radiographs that showed that the secondary dent formed and the pulp receded, and the distance between the cavity and the pulp increased significantly. So I basically proved that you can medically treat caries in 1983. I was the first person to ever do that.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
So you were using silver diamine fluoride in 1983?
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Yeah, I was.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Wow.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
I tell you what happened, which was really shocking. I wrote up the paper. I had a really supportive professor. I was working part-time in a department of dental public health in university college, and he was super supportive. And we sent it to the British Dental Journal, and they came back with a bunch of criticisms. The statistics of a half mouth design were dubious. I'm thinking, how could you get a better control? It was just unbelievable. They came up with all sorts of objections. I spent months re-analyzing it to fit their statisticians comments, and they accepted the paper. So they were ready to print, and then they decided not to publish. Some top guy in the dental association said that they didn't want heresy published in the British Dental Journal. Because as you remember back then, if you put a filling over decay, you'd fail your exams, wouldn't you?
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
And what was I doing? I was putting fillings over rampant decay that was left behind. I didn't do that actually. I spoon excavated the worst out, and then I treated it chemically, and then I put a filling on. So that got blocked. And I was so annoyed because I had spent two or three years of my life on that one. And at that point, I was moving to New Zealand and I just ran out of energy for that particular project. And it did eventually get published. That same professor carried on, and about 10 years later it got published. But in the meantime, another dentist who had read my thesis, Hinkle I think his name was, he was working in Tanzania, and he basically copied the whole idea and published it and claimed the credit for it. And then it became the ART, the atraumatic restorative technique that the WHO adopted. But I started it. It was that thesis there. I personally don't get too bent out of shape. I'll just move on really.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
So you're positive, you move on. You don't see it as a block in your pathway. You might see it as a minor annoyance, but you shift and you continue on.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Yeah.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Would you say you're persistent?
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Very, but up to a point. At some point you do have to move on. In that particular case, what else could I do, really? I could have carried on trying to get it published somewhere else, but moving to New Zealand was a big break with the past. And also having two or three young children at that point made it difficult. And I got into writing software and doing all sorts of other things at that point.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Why am I not surprised? Your brain never stops, does it?
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Yeah, that's right.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Simon is someone who is never still and who is always dreaming of what might be next. As you can imagine, he really admires the other great entrepreneurs of our age. One individual that Simon brought up in our conversation was Steve Jobs. In 2000 jobs described the McIntosh computer's new graphics as looking so good, you'll want to lick them.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
So he was very, very product focused and customer focused, but in an interesting way same thing Henry Ford said, if I asked my customers what they'd want, they'd say a faster horse. Because that was a really perceptive observation that there's no point going to a group of dentists and say, "What do you want?" In fact, Graeme who-
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Graeme Milicich.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Graeme Milicich. I asked Graeme to ask a number of dentists in the courses he would do if they could come up with problems that needed solving. And I think he asked that quite a number of times. But I remember him saying about the only question... Somebody put their hand up and said, "How'd you get better people in the front desk?" But it was actually, we were asking a product problem.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Right, exactly.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
But we didn't get anything. And I've asked a similar sort of thing and it just doesn't happen. With the V-Ring-
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Was that your first invention?
Dr. Simon McDonald:
First successful one. With the V-Ring, there were a lot of people who as soon as they saw it, they smacked themselves on the forehead with a hand and said, "How could I not have invented that myself?" Because they had all struggled with, where'd you put the tines, in front of the wedge or behind the wedge? That was a beauty. That was a fantastic. That didn't happen overnight. 180 prototypes. It was just ridiculous how long it took me.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
So what was that journey like?
Dr. Simon McDonald:
When I finished dental school in the UK, the options were to go into general practice or academia or there were some salaried jobs. But the NHS, the National Health System at that time was appalling and it promoted very poor quality dentistry. A treadmill replacement of fillings, I just thought was unethical. So I couldn't go into general practice there. So I ended up both in a salaried job treating children and an academic job. But when I came to New Zealand, I did work in a school for dental therapists. I ended up managing health services in New Zealand. I was looking after a large area of dental therapy, school dental service, and other services as well, actually at one stage. But then I got made redundant from that, and I went back into practice. And I had a plan of five years.
I thought I could survive five years in general practice, but I didn't know whether I could last longer than that. Because I know some people seem to have got the knack of enjoying it, but I found it quite challenging. Probably if I did it again, I would do it slightly differently. But I put too much time pressure on myself, and I should have probably done a lot more orthodontics. I was doing too much operative stuff. You're doing brain surgery 70% of the day, it's hard going. It's a burnout problem. So I saw burnout as an issue, and so I said to my wife who was a teacher, she left teaching and looked after the front desk. I said, "I've got a five-year plan to come up with some other form of income because I can only do this for five years." I didn't want to go beyond that. And so every product that I used that didn't work very well, I thought, how could we make this better?
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Hi Contrary To Ordinary listeners, we're going to take a short break from this conversation for our segment, Questions With Dr. Kim. Don't go anywhere. In this segment, I'll answer a listener's question about their dental health. If you have a dental question that you want answered, then send it to podcast@carifree.com, spelled C-A-R-I-F-R-E-E .com, and add questions with Dr. Kim in the subject line. If your question gets read out on the show, then we'll send you a small gift to say thanks for checking in. This week's question reads, "Dear Dr. Kim, I wanted to start by saying that I'm really enjoying the show. I recently found a toothpaste that I really like, but it's not ADA approved. Is it safe to use?" Thanks so much for asking this interesting question. The American Dental Association, the ADA seal of acceptance is a respected certification that indicates a dental product has undergone testing and meets certain safety and efficacy standards. However, the absence of the ADA seal does not necessarily mean that a dental product is unsafe or ineffective.
Healthcare products in the United States are carefully regulated by the FDA, and more important is the FDA marketing clearance, which ensures the product conforms to accepted safety requirements. There are many dental products on the market that may not have pursued ADA certification for various reasons, such as small manufacturers or specialized products that may not fit into the ADA's criteria. To determine if a dental product is safe and effective, consult with your dental professional, read product reviews and evaluate the ingredients and the claims made. Thanks so much again for this question and if you, dear listener, would like more information on all things dental, then head to CariFree.com, that's C-A-R-I-F-R-E .com, where we've got more resources on dental health and our line of CariFree products that can help you keep a healthy smile. But right now, let's get back to the conversation.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
So I'd come across the Garrison ring and thought that was quite good-
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
The Garrison.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
The Palodent ring and all those. But I remember them jumping off across the room and hitting the wall, things like that. And I remember coming up with this mad idea that wouldn't it be great... That's a good question of mine is wouldn't it be great if. That's a good inventor's question because then you can let your mind flow and go wherever it wants-
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
And get that creative kind of thing going.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Yeah, wouldn't it be great if. And I said, wouldn't it be great if you could put the matrix bands, the wedge and the retainer ring on at the same time? I set about doing that. I made some rings with lugs on the side, a bit like the current rings actually. And I got the springs from the local mower repair guy, because those weeded whackers, what do you call them? Weeded eaters?
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Yeah, weeded eaters.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Weed eaters. You know when you whack it down on the ground and it lets a bit more rope out? There's a spring in there that's about the right size. It's about an inch diameter. And so I was always going down to get some more springs. The guy never knew what I was doing with them, but I was like, "You got anymore of those springs?" "We're running out." And I'd cut them and heat them red hot and bend them down to give it like the tine and then put a little plastic lug on the end. Another thing about inventing is you can flip something, you can invert something. So a wedge is pushed, so I came up with a pull wedge, and it was a soft rubbery thing with a triangular cross section in a very skinny long pyramid.
It was a tail that you pulled into the proximal space. And so I came up with this thing, they're called the Tri-Clip, and that's actually how I met Graeme. Because I took it to my first New Zealand Dental Association, real last minute thing, just a table at the back. And somebody brought Graeme over and I showed it to Graham. I was going to explain. He says, "No, don't say anything. Let me look at this." And he picked it up and he turned it around and he looks on the model and he thought it was pretty amazing. So we became good friends after that. And that took off quite well. And we went over to New York to the Greater New York Dental Meeting, and spent a lot of money to get there. And we were rather back of the hall behind a huge concrete pillar. And we sold about a hundred dollars worth. Maybe two.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Maybe $200 worth.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
And it costs $40,000 to get there. So that was a total disaster. But what did happen was I met a wonderful guy called Jim Hirsch who owns Isolite. And he came over and he said, "That's an interesting product." Super great guy.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Yeah, great guy.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Because I was selling six in a box for $29 or something. He says, "It's too cheap. You'll never make money out of that. You've got to increase the price." So I thought, that makes good sense. So I increased the size of the box and we sold... I don't know, we increased the price to 150 or something. And then it started to sell. It was great advice. He saved the company, actually, because I would've gone under if he hadn't come along and said that. And so I came back from New York and sales were mediocre. And I'd done my spreadsheets and it said, if a certain percentage of people rebuy, this is what the revenue, and you predict your cash flow forward. And it all looked quite good. And I based it on 50% repurchased. 5% were repurchasing. I thought, oh my goodness, this is a disaster. Because the zeros started disappearing. The product just wasn't selling. And I knew why. I got feedback. It was too difficult to use.
It was too difficult to put all three things in at the same time. It was a stupid idea to try and do all three things at once. And I realized what a blunder. Dentists don't want to put all three things in at once. Why not just make it better and get rid of the problem with the wedge, which I had already fixed. And three o'clock in the morning when I was sweating at night thinking, I've wasted 250... This is nearly 20 years ago. And I thought I'd wasted everybody's money. And I woke up in a sweat thinking, oh, this is disastrous. And then this image of the V-Ring came to my mind and I thought, you stupid idiot. We need a good wedge, a good matrix, which we'd already been making, and a ring that straddles the wedges. That's all I needed. So I jumped out of bed, I couldn't go back to sleep. And I drew this thing up, and the next day I went down to... The people who were doing the manufacturing were tool makers who were making roofing tiles, like-
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Roofing tiles and dental matrix range.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
They don't really go together. So they were using a hundred ton presses to make enormous roofing tiles that were punched out that looked like terracotta tiles and stuff. A yard wide. Each press was absolutely massive. But nevertheless, they still knew the principles. And another funny thing that happened, where did the nickel titanium come from? When this new product arrived in my head, I was sure we should make it out a nickel titanium, as We all know what that is. Super elastic. It made great sense to make that ring out of that. And you can't just go and buy nickel titanium. You have to have it placed an order, they melt the metal into a big ingot and then they roll it out with very, very expensive machinery because you have to do it in an oxygen free environment. I found someone who could make it. The only way I could get it was a $40,000 order for, I think, two huge sheets of this stuff. And this was all based upon the idea that we could forge the nickel titanium into the right shape as a one piece.
And I thought to myself, who do I know who could help that process? My front desk woman husband was a panel beater. And I thought to myself, well, he knows about metal bending. Go and talk to him. So yeah, he was willing to take on the project, and his sidekick worked with me and we tried various different tools to try and form a V-Ring out of a flat cutout piece. And the first one we made worked perfectly. It was just a fluke. We couldn't repeat it. We just couldn't repeat it. In fact, I gave it to Graeme, I think, and he called it the old dunger. It looked horrible, but it worked brilliantly. It was superb. All the other ones came out just looked terrible. They just all twisted and warped and irregular and it was just terrible. So I had this big sheet of nickel titanium. I'm thinking, what earth am I going to do? I can't make this lot. And then I went to see these toolmakers again, and you know the expression, if you've got a hammer, everything's a nail.
Well those guys, if you've got a problem, you use a press tool to fix it. And I showed them my problem and they said, "Well, why don't you just make a stainless steel bit with the tines and put the nickel titanium around the outside?" Great idea. Brilliant. And quite quickly, they managed to make a machine that punched out the stainless steel blank and form it to the right shape. And then I found someone to laser cut out the rings. When I showed it to people, they were just dying to get. It took off wildfire, and the company just grew crazily fast. Originally, I had a spare room in my dental surgery where all the stock was for the Tri-Clip, but as soon as the V-Ring came along, I rented a place across the road, repainted, made it look nice, took on one staff, two staff, three staff, four staff, five staff. And in three months we had to move out and give the lease back, and went to a much bigger place. And it just grew and grew and grew from there. It was a very exciting run.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Often people don't follow through with their inventions because they think their idea is too obvious. Something might seem obvious, but that doesn't mean that it's out there yet. Bringing an idea to life is about having the vision and tenacity to push through what can be a long and drawn out process. I don't know many people who would be willing or able to go through as many prototypes as Simon did on his various journeys of invention. Another great thinker that has influenced Simon's direction of travel is Dr. Edward De Bono.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
And he was the guy who came up with electrical thinking term. And he wrote quite a few books. And he was very influential on my thinking. And he wrote a book, I think it was called Beyond Po, and Po is a shortening of the word, let's suppose. So let's suppose is a really open question. It allows you to go anywhere. As soon as you say, let's suppose.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
If anything was possible.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Let's suppose. And this book lists all the ways that you can invent something, basically. It's a great book. It's still around, I'm sure. So one of the things you can do is invert something. That's where the pull wedge comes from. So you could just try it. What happens if you invert it? Turn it upside down, do the opposite of what it normally does. The other big part of let's suppose is an inventive step goes through an impossible intermediary stage. What most people do is they throw it out at that stage, they just dismiss it. But the inventor holds that impossible intermediary stage and say, "Well, if that was possible, what problems does it present and how can we fix those?" And quite often, you can then fix those seemingly impossibles, and that's how you come up with a product that nobody's ever thought of because you've gone over hill, apparent impossibility. And then there's something on the other side.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
I think too, extraordinary people look at things that seemingly are impossible, and yet then they sort out how to make it possible and they get to an intermediary step and they keep going, where a lot of people would just quit and turn back. One of the questions I pose to a lot of people is that ability, being extraordinary, being visionary, having those kind of traits, do you think that's something that's innate that you were born with or-
Dr. Simon McDonald:
No, I think you can learn it. You've got to have curiosity. All children have got curiosity. It gets driven out of them. That's the problem.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Or gets taught out of them.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Or taught out of them, yeah.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Or is extraordinary a place that you choose to go to? Or is it a combination of all three?
Dr. Simon McDonald:
I'm not sure really. I can't really explain why. I find it odd that other people aren't as curious as I am. They probably find I'm weird or a bit boring because I'm always saying, "How does that work? Why is that happening? What's going on here?" But they don't seem to think that way. I don't know. I think they've lost it. Somewhere along the line it fell off the bus.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Or maybe they just never had it.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
No, I don't think that's true because children-
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Children tend to be curious.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
They do.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
They pick things up and look at it, turn around and analyze it. Of course, everything is new to a child, and so they stay curious. So I think then one of the things for you is to stay curious.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Yeah, huge.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
And maybe nurture their curiosity throughout their entire life. And you're still curious. Henry Ford once said, "Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80. Anyone who keeps learning stays young." I see this useful curiosity in so many of my guests. They're all so different, but shared this as a common trait that invites new challenges into their lives. Simon mentioned his brush with programming earlier, but he's also branched out into other areas of invention.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
I've invented a sign machine. Basically there's a bobbin and then there's a needle. That's the basis of the sewing machine. And there's a thing that goes around the bobbin that's mechanically connected to the timing of the needle. And the problem is that you can't get a lot of fabric underneath the arm of the sewing machine. So on for a sale, for example, or a huge piece of canvas, you've got a problem. So I said to myself, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could separate the needle mechanism from the bobbin mechanism, have them completely independent." And I have actually invented a machine that does that. I spent a lot of time inventing it. I should have spent a bit more time thinking about the commercial side of it because and I'm not a hundred percent sure there's a home for it. But I think there could be. But I actually actually made a machine-
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
You actually made one that functions and-
Dr. Simon McDonald:
I actually made one that sews, and you can lift the top off completely and put it back again, and it sews again. So it means that you don't have any restriction on the size of the size of the fabric. You could even have it CNC programmed to crawl along the floor. If you were in a cell loft, you could make it walk along following a line with the bobbin underneath and the sewing needle on the top, and it would sew as it goes. But I haven't actually done anything about that one.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
So looking at your career, Simon, what would you consider your biggest success?
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Well, definitely the Tri-Clip business. It was a fantastic-
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
The beavering business.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Yeah, yeah. That was superb. That was a dream come true. Maybe a lot of people do suffer from this thought, but I had this voice in me that used to say, things don't work out.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
And so it was self-criticism, your own echo?
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Yeah, doubt. I think it's the kind of thing, don't get too excited, prepare for failure.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
You bring up a really interesting topic, the whole concept between success and failure, how you define success, and the balance of how do you navigate through that. Because some people have a fear of success. Some people literally block themselves from being successful because maybe it's a reward, they don't feel worthy or whatever. And then you have people that operate from a point of fear of failure. So It's like, burn the bridges in the harbor because we're going to make this happen, hell or high water. I don't care what it takes, I'm not going to fail. So I'm trying figure out how do those feel in your own life?
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Well, I think it had been from experience, because a lot of things in the end that didn't work out. Maybe it's a tendency to focus on the negative, take for granted the things that did work out. But I did have this little horrible voice in me that says, "Prepare yourself for a disappointment, basically."
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
How did you get around that?
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Well, I just kept trying and the TriDent thing, it did work out. It was a dream come true. By that stage in my life, I was 50. So I had a lot more life skills by then to navigate, understand a lot more about how businesses work. Although I was pretty naive when we started the TriDent business. But I was lucky to find some really good people to work with who had the skills I didn't have. And I knew I needed some financial help and also management help. And I had all those basic skills, but not my forte or my particular interest either. I'm much more interested in product development than-
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Than spreadsheets?
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Than spreadsheets, yeah.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
You still have that voice in your ear?
Dr. Simon McDonald:
No.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Not much anymore.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
I think I killed that one off.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Now the voice is saying, "Hey, watch this." Right? Yeah, hang on everybody, watch this.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Yeah, that's right. Try to do it again. Yeah, we've had our struggles done. Tried lots of products that don't work. Lots of things that everybody tries, probably one and 10 is going to work if you're lucky. But as they say, the more mistakes you make, the more chance you've got. And as I said to my wife the other night, the only people that don't make mistakes are dead.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
It always seems like the harder you work, the luckier get. A lot of people say, "Oh gosh, he's so lucky." Or you get to that overnight success and they didn't see the 15 years and 180 prototypes and sleepless nights and things that it took to get there. And I think the courage, I think that's another really important trait. You had this vision, you knew this would work, and in spite of the fact that you continued to run into obstacles, but you knew it could work.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
Well, I had evidence. I think that's important. If I didn't have the evidence, I don't think I would have been so... But I'd seen it myself. I'd worked hard on something that also I knew worked that nobody else wanted to buy.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Oh, there's some great ideas and some great products that it's just like, but nobody else sees the purpose or need for it.
Dr. Simon McDonald:
No, they don't really see the problem. Or you can get carried away with something thinking that everybody needs... One big problem, I think I have and other inventors have is that market research before you've developed something only works for some things. If you say to a dentist, "If there was a product that did this, this, and this and this, would you buy it?" A sensible dentist is going to say, "I don't know until I tried it. Give me one and I'll tell you. That's a sensible response. You can't do market research to find out. The problem is you have to spend a lot of money to get a prototype before you can even do the market research. And by that time, you might as well launch the product anyway.
Dr.Kim Kutsch:
Thanks for listening to part one of my interview with Dr. Simon McDonald. In part two, Simon and I will be diving further into his inventive spirit and we'll be discussing his PhD that studied the computer modeling patterns of tooth decay. And we'll explore what Simon does for fun. Around here, we aim to inspire and create connections. We can't do it without you. If this conversation moved you, made you smile, or scratched that little itch of curiosity today, please share it with the extraordinary people in your life. And if you do one thing today, let it be extraordinary.