Early on in secondary school, my English teacher announced to the class that he’d decided which movie we were going to study that year. With bated breath he revealed it would be The Matrix and the room of boys collectively exhaled. You could feel the excitement and the relief that we weren’t going to get saddled with yet another Shakespearean or dystopian sombre-fest that had a lot of great hidden meanings but was incredibly unenjoyable to watch.
The enthusiasm, however, slowly wore off. Fast forward to the present and I am still unable to watch the film without noting every single reference and hidden meaning and distinguishing between the green or blue filters the director applied to different scenes. Needless to say, it’s a tough watch.
What has remained with me, though, is the pivotal moment when Neo is offered a choice by rebel leader Morpheus: “You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
Blue pill vs red pill
The nature of our industry is that neither the blue nor red pill is necessarily the wrong one. Many optometrists have been successful for a long time by doing the tried and true and doing it very well (blue pill). What we are seeing, however, is an influx of younger ownership bringing greater curiosity about the available options and how they can explore a fresh approach and push the envelope (red pill). This injection of thinking and ideas into the Independent Optometry Group has been a significant one and has challenged the status quo on how our owners manage their practices and how they look at outcomes for the future.
