After 20 Years, Dr. Thom LeBeau Finally Wrote The Black Sheep Advantage
“I don’t think there’s a better way to mark your path or return the knowledge that you have accumulated than writing a book.”
Dr. Thom LeBeau, author of The Black Sheep Advantage
Dr. Thom LeBeau talked about writing a book for 20 years. A podiatrist and entrepreneur who still sees around 250 patients a week, he kept starting and stopping, sure he could never find the time. Then he found Scribe. He finally published The Black Sheep Advantage, and he calls the process cheaper than therapy, crediting it with teaching him something about himself he had missed for decades.
Twenty years of talking about it
Thom did not realize how long the book had been sitting in his head until an old friend in London did the math for him.
“He said, oh, is that the book you were talking about in 2004? I’m like, yeah, I guess it was. So [...] I apparently have been talking about this book for 20 years.”
Dr. Thom LeBeau
The problem was never the ideas. It was that a practicing physician seeing hundreds of patients a week could never get the thing organized and finished alone.
Why Scribe
What finally worked was a team and a standing time to show up, every Friday afternoon, plus a process that turned a mountain into a set of steps.
“What I loved about it was, it was not such an insurmountable thing. It was a step-by-step thing [...] it made it doable.”
Dr. Thom LeBeau
His one line for anyone with his kind of schedule: it is possible, you just have to get with the right team.
The idea, and a billionaire in his office
The book grew out of a lifetime of going the other way when the crowd went one direction, and one encounter in his mid-30s that gave him permission to keep doing it.
“He gave me [...] a pat on the back and said, keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t worry about everybody else. Don’t worry about what they think. And that guy was Tom Monahan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza.”
Dr. Thom LeBeau
That became The Black Sheep Advantage: a case for difference as a source of advantage, told through a physician who set up his own practice to defy the conventional wisdom of his field.
What the book is already doing
Clip · Dr. Thom LeBeau on readers he never expected · 22s
The book is new, and Thom is candid that the real work of getting it out into the world has only just started. Even so, interest is already arriving from places he never wrote it for.
“Even though we just launched not long ago, I’m already getting input from places I did not expect. My niece is a counselor and she works with neurodivergent people [...] she wants to use it in her patient population.”
Dr. Thom LeBeau
He is leaning into podcasts as the way to reach his audience, with a companion workbook and an online course of him teaching the book both on the way.
Cheaper than therapy
Clip · Dr. Thom LeBeau on why it was cheaper than therapy · 5s
When friends ask what working with Scribe cost, Thom has a standard answer, and it is not about the money. Writing the book surfaced something about himself he had carried, unexamined, for a career.
“I realized that I became a doctor to be seen. Six of seven kids, everybody’s an engineer [...] I learned that during the process.”
Dr. Thom LeBeau
Learn, earn, return
Thom describes life in three phases, learn, earn, and return, and sees the book as the start of the return. With about three years left seeing patients daily, he is lining up speaking, teaching, and more books for what comes next. His advice to anyone sitting where he sat is short.
“For anybody who’s thinking they can’t do it, just start. And I think it’ll be one of the most rewarding things you ever do.”
Dr. Thom LeBeau
You can find Dr. Thom LeBeau and the book at drthom.org.
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