Frans Nel draws an analogy between teeth needing retainers after braces to stay aligned and people needing encouragement to stay remarkable. The document discusses how teeth want to revert to their original positions without retainers, and similarly people want to fall back to old habits without being reminded of their talents. It encourages taking risks to create remarkable work and be artists, and finding ways to regularly remind yourself of your genius, like wearing a retainer, to stay aligned in your new exceptional self.

1. MY FRIDAY STORY
RETAINERS, RUBBER BANDS AND BEING A GENIUS
By Frans Nel
One of my favourite movies is the 1986 John Hughes comedy, Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off, starring Matthew Broderick and Alan Ruck.
There is a scene where Ferris is trying to convince his best friend Cameron
to take his dad’s Ferrari 250GT California for a spin. Cameron, obviously
trying his best to dissuade him of this plan, tries to get Ferris to understand
what his father is like and especially when it comes to his priceless Ferrari
– a car his father apparently loves more than his own son. Cameron
mentions that once he lost his retainer, apparently a petty little thing and
his father went berserk, imagine what he would do if anything ever
happened to his beloved Ferrari?
I wondered for a long time what the heck a retainer is – I had never heard
the term. So, I decided to Google the word – sometime after 1998 because
Google only came into existence in 1998! There, Wikipedia gave me the
explanation I had needed for all those years: A retainer is used afterbraces
have been removed from your teeth, in order to keep them from going back
to the way they were before the braces were installed. It appears that teeth
that have been cajoled into a different place in your mouth actually want
nothing more than to return to where they were, skew or not! So they tend
to gravitate back to where they were happiest, even if they don’t look as
pretty.
I decided late in life (in my 40’s) to get my teeth straightened and looking
pretty. I had a real mix-mash in the front bottom row! I fervently denied
suggestions that this was a mid-life crisis and explained that it was simply

2. an effort to correct what God had obviously overlooked, when putting me
together.
After 18 months of stretching and wrangling, pulling and coercing, the
braces eventually came off. Beautiful straight little tats were now adorning
the bottom half of my jaw. However, without one moment’s hesitation
before I exited the dentist’s chair, I was handed my own personal retainer.
So, this is what it looks like! It was to be worn every night for a year, so
that my newly aligned teeth would not go back to where they were in my
pre-vanity 30’s.
Now you have to understand, being an adult (or at least the age of one),
we have some serious things on our minds. Things like school fees,
mortgage repayments, child maintenance payments (I think the divorce
might have had something to do with the need for braces), credit card
repayments, and car payments, insurance – you get the picture, big things.
By the time I get to bed at night, there is very little more on my mind than
hitting the pillow with my face and sending my brain and body off to la-la
land. Who had time to remember forcing an uncomfortable wire and plastic
contraption that resembles your grandma’s false teeth, without the teeth,
into your mouth?
So, for a while the little holder that housed my retainer was neglected and
found its way to the back of my bedside drawer. This meant that my teeth
never got the necessary encouragement they needed to stay where they
are – in their nice new sexy positions (well, I think they are sexy). So, as
you might have guessed, they started wandering away from the new
positions that 18 months of raw gums and bright coloured rubber bands
tried to achieve, back in the direction of that dark, bad place we so badly
want them to forget.
My orthodontist was not impressed with the tardy approach I had to the
vital role that the little contraption in the luminous holder (so that you can
see it glowing on your bedside table in the middle of the night!) plays on
the success of the final outcome.

3. This brings me to my thoughts on how similar we are to those teeth – and
the need for a retainer. We often have to be coerced and cajoled out of the
rut we find ourselves in, the comfort zone, that place where we aren’t
outstanding or extraordinary but actually quite dull and boring. We all need
to be reminded of what we could be, how special and talented we are.
Seth Godin, author of many books on the subject of being unique,
(Linchpin, Poke the Box and Graceful) and Steven Pressfield, author of The
War of Art (get it, it’s one of the best books you will ever read!) both say:
We have all been a genius at least once in our life.
The thing is we all need a ‘retainer’ into our lives. We need a retainer to
keep us from falling back into our old bad habits of being less than
remarkable. We need a retainer to stop us from thinking less of ourselves.
We need to be reminded of our greatness, our possibilities, if only we would
stand up and be willing to do the hard work.
The ability to be creative is within every one of us. You have done it before,
and you will know when that was. The only reason you didn’t do it again is
out of fear of being noticed, or the fear of failing. The strange thing is you
also remember how it made you feel when you DID do something that was
genius-like. It made you feel free and alive!
The ‘retainer’ that you should introduce into your life to stop ever going
back to being less than amazing, is to keep doing remarkable, scary,
ambitious, weird, crazy, exceptional, memorable work. Again and again.
Of course, failure is a real possibility, if not a certainty. That’s what makes
being unique and creative so valuable. When we stick out like shiny, new,
aligned and sexy teeth, there is the big chance that we will be noticed. The
fact is that if you stayed in where you were, skew and misaligned, un-sexy
and boring, you would probably not be at risk of being noticed for being a
linchpin.

4. However, putting yourself in the limelight by being willing to take a risk,
doing something differently, upsetting the status quo, challenging
convention, then you are being an ‘artist.’ An artist doesn’t only mean a
person that paints or sculpts or designs. An artist can be anyone who is
willing to create something new – everyone can be an artist. An artist takes
the risk of making something she believes in and then unveils it for the
world to see. The creation doesn’t mean much unless it is shown to an
audience.
The strange thing about the retainer is that after a while, we won’t have to
wear it that much anymore and eventually, our teeth will have settled in
their new sparkling positions for good. That’s what the habit of repeatedly
being an artist does, it becomes ‘the way we are.’
There is one last parting thought. You have to start. You have to put the
braces on so that the process of alignment can begin. Without starting, the
habit will never take shape.
So, what are you waiting for?
Start today by doing something that is creative.
Then keep doing it… and remember to smile!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frans Nel lives in sunny South Africa and loves every moment of being able
to smile and make other people smile. He is a divorced father of two
teenagers and tries to live a life filled with love and laughter. He loves
writing, painting and music. His true wish is for more people to look for the
good in each other as a starting point, rather than looking for reasons to
distrust and judge. Deep down, he feels that we all really just want to be
loved and understood. Frans can be contacted at frans@leap1st.com