As I overlook the Tokyo skyline writing this blog, I cannot help but reflect on the aspects of this country that made me fall in love with it. There is an overwhelming emphasis on perfection of craft, efficiency, consistency, and predictability.
You see it in the food—the dedication chefs have, to ensure every dish is exceptional, yet tastes exactly the same every single time, even if you return ten years later. You see it in the train system, where delays are announced down to the second and millions of people move seamlessly through stations without chaos.
In many ways, it reflects Japan’s philosophy of Kaizen—the art of continuous improvement.
As doctors, we constantly strive for improvement: refining our skills, elevating our care, and pursuing better outcomes for our patients. We embody Kaizen every single day.
One way of improvement that I have centered my career in dentistry around, is social media creation.
I grew up during the internet’s infancy—when Myspace was cool, computers took six minutes to turn on, and your phone flipped open. Yet despite growing up during that era, I had very little exposure to technology in my early years. I played outside, stayed out late exploring with friends, and came home sweating in time for dinner. By the time I truly arrived at the doors of technology as a teenager, social media existed, but it looked nothing like it does today. It was Justin Bieber posting grainy selfies in flat-brim hats covered in oversaturated filters.
That era reminded me of the first “influencers” I followed while aspiring to become a dentist: Dr. Matt Asaro and Dr. Michael Apa, to name a few. They posted unpolished videos to relatively small audiences, long before polished production and algorithms dominated the internet. Whether they were visionaries who predicted what social media would become or simply individuals driven by the desire to inspire and create, they shared one defining trait: they chose to do instead of simply consume.
That realization led me to create my first video in UNC’s endodontics clinic while testing new technology from Bluewave. At first, it was simply fun—a creative hobby. But as my following slowly began to grow, so did my vision for what social media could become. I started thinking about how I could use it not only to document dentistry, but also to promote oral health, healthy lifestyles, and nutrition in a way that could genuinely help patients. In turn, this also exposed me to new technologies, workflows, and restorative materials that reshaped the way I thought about efficiency and esthetics in dentistry.
In the heat of long residency hours at the VA Hospital in Kernersville, North Carolina, my social media algorithm kept feeding me the same types of videos: doctors creating content. Plastic surgeons, dermatologists, internal medicine physicians, dentists, every specialty imaginable. Yet there was one common thread woven through all of them: almost every creator was significantly older.
Watching 50- and 60-year-old doctors embrace social media, I kept asking myself, Why so late to the game? These were professionals who had practiced through the rise of the internet, the birth of YouTube, and the foundational growth of social media itself—so why were they only stepping into content creation now?
Night after night, after long but productive days, I searched for an answer. My research, combined with intuition, led me to a simple conclusion: this is the new age of marketing. Social media, as massive as it already seems, is only going to become bigger, stronger, and more influential.
Seeing so many older physicians and dentists stepping into social media also shifted how I understood the platform itself. It is not that they arrived late, but that the system around them finally changed. For most of their careers, reputation was built locally in their community—through referrals, word of mouth, and time. Now, those same principles are being translated into a digital environment where education, visibility, and influence are no longer limited by geography. What felt like a sudden wave of older creators was really a reflection of a broader shift in healthcare, the realization that expertise alone is no longer enough to be seen, understood, or accessed. In many ways, they are not adapting to a trend, they are adapting to a structural change in how knowledge is distributed.
Connecting those memories with the trend of older doctors entering social media answered a question that had been lingering in my mind since my first day of residency: What kind of dentist do I want to be? More importantly, how can I become the best possible version of myself?
I knew one thing with certainty—I did not want to be average. I wanted to inspire people the same way I had been inspired by my role models growing up.
As I have continued exploring this creative outlet—fine-tuning my editing skills and learning how to better express myself—I have realized that social media has not necessarily brought me more work as an associate dentist. Instead, it has given me something arguably more valuable early in my career: connection. It has become a powerful networking tool and a gateway to learning from more established dental creators. Some own thriving private practices, while others have mastered cosmetic dentistry. Through their content and conversations, they offer insights into scaling skills, building a reputation, and testimonies on how to become the best dentist you can be.
As I begin this journey into social media at the start of my dental career, it feels like a time capsule of my beginnings—a blank slate documenting what I may eventually grow into, all recorded through a small app on a phone. My social media presence will inevitably evolve alongside the seasons of my life, my career, my pursuit of excellence in dentistry, and my growth as an individual.
More than anything, I hope to create a visual representation of that growth—a playbook showing what a young dentist can become through consistency, discipline, and the philosophy of Kaizen. Just as I was inspired during the early stages of social media, I hope to inspire others watching my journey. If nothing else, I want to show that it does not matter where you begin, only where you are willing to go.
