What the Fortunate Fishes Podcast Revealed About Leading Like an Outsider
By Bekah W., Digital Marketing Manager
In most rooms, the safest move is to agree with the people who have been there the longest.
But what if the people who’ve been there the longest are the reason the room stopped growing?
Dr. Jason Gladwell recently joined the Fortunate Fishes podcast for a conversation that covered everything from growing up in North Omaha to holding the world record for single-day Invisalign volume, nine times over. What came through clearly wasn’t just the resume. It was the mindset behind it.
Here are three leadership lessons that stood out:
1. Discomfort Is the Starting Point, Not a Warning Sign
Jason didn’t grow up with a clear path to success. A single mom raised him, watched his older brother slide toward gang life, and landed at NC State off the waitlist with no study habits and no real plan.
What he had was awareness. He walked into that university and immediately recognized he was outgunned.
Most people feel that and quietly retreat. Jason made one rule: never miss a class, never let fun come before work. He did the exact opposite of everything he had done before and finished first in his class.
The takeaway for practice leaders is this: growth starts when you stop waiting to feel ready. Whether you’re a doctor learning to have difficult financial conversations with patients or a TC working to improve your case acceptance rate, the discomfort is not a signal to stop. It’s a signal that you’re in the right place.
Teams that avoid hard conversations stay average. Teams that lean into them grow.
2. When the Room Says No, That’s Data, Not a Decision
Jason runs one of the largest single-day Invisalign events in the world. One year, he was twenty percent short on bookings with a week to go.
He looked at the opt-in lists across his businesses, landed on his gun club’s database, and sent three options: a membership, a discount on orthodontic treatment, or a Glock 19.
His marketing team said no. Every one of them.
His response: “We disagree and commit.”
The promotion went viral. A council of churches called him a public health menace. Invisalign pulled him from their website. National media picked it up.
It was also the best orthodontic month of his career.
Now, this isn’t a post about promotional tactics. It’s about something more fundamental: the difference between useful pushback and institutional resistance. Most committees are built to minimize risk, not to drive growth. Learning to tell the difference is one of the most underrated leadership skills in any practice.
At GPS, we teach doctors to build teams that can execute with confidence. That requires a culture where “no” gets examined, not just accepted.
3. Arming Your “Competition” Can Be Your Smartest Growth Move
Jason built what he calls the Strategic Partners Program, a system designed to help general dentists do Invisalign better. The orthodontic community wasn’t thrilled about it.
The concern was straightforward: he was teaching competitors to take cases that would otherwise come to a specialist.
The reality was more interesting. Most general dentists do a limited number of Invisalign cases per year, and many can’t tell which cases are within their skill level and which aren’t. Jason gave them specialist-level case design, which improved both their volume and their outcomes.
And because those dentists were now better at identifying what they couldn’t handle, they started sending those harder cases directly to Jason.
He built his own referral pipeline out of the people the profession told him to protect against.
This is the same thinking that drives GPS’s approach to practice growth. When you lead with generosity, when you invest in your team’s education, share knowledge freely, and treat relationships as long-term assets, trust builds. And trust drives referrals more reliably than any marketing campaign.
The Bottom Line
Clinical skill will only take a practice so far. What separates the practices that scale from the ones that plateau is leadership; the kind that tolerates discomfort, challenges consensus, and builds systems around people instead of managing around them.
As Dr. Gladwell’s career shows, you don’t have to follow the room’s rules to earn the room’s respect. You just need clarity, consistency, and the willingness to commit.
Want to hear the full conversation?
Watch Dr. Gladwell’s full episode of the Fortunate Fishes podcast below: