Find work and a life beyond the billable hour.
Being smart in a culture that prizes the punch-list lifestyle can lead you, unwittingly, to living a life and making career choices based on fear. You choose stuff that you know you’re good at, which provides little room for growth. Problem is, you won’t stretch your boundaries and your sense of who you are by staying in your safe little box of intellectual prowess.
After much thought, I’ve realized what the solution is to many of the woes rocking the legal profession: Lawyers all need to learn how to knit. Seriously. Everything you need to know about pursuing goals, having a satisfying career, and making changes in your life can be learned by knitting.
How do you distinguish between healthy optimism—the faith that good things will happen for you—and the crazy thinking of intermittent rewards? One way is to look at the payoff you’re pining for: Gamblers are in it for the adrenaline rush, and the money. Neither of these are long-term, sustainable values that fuel healthy personal growth. When you’re optimistic about something, for example focusing on creating a real change in your life connected with something you really value, the dynamic is totally different. Your thoughts circle around that vision, and create a positive energy that attracts things that help that vision become reality.
I know, none of you reading here have a problem with materialism. Other jackass lawyers you work with? Yeah, absolutely.
So I’m sure you’ve heard about the New York Times’ nicely scathing article about the dysfunction of legal education in
Deciding to leave the law is not a decision to make lightly. There are personal, professional, and financial ramifications when
It is difficult to explain how and why I left my job as an attorney without first explaining how and
Here’s the really hard truth about laziness: It doesn’t exist. It’s a cover for scared. Shit scared to the point of paralysis, with a fat layer of “I’m OK, in fact I’m having fun!” deception slathered on top. It fools a lot of people.
Most of the time, goals aren’t set from the inside out. So we get lots of lawyers setting extrinsic goals and living to the outside, to the external, to those priorities and values not their own. It’s the ticket to a life of disconnection and discontent.
What if, instead of waiting for a better time to tackle your problems, you got off the crisis management merry-go-round and started making the truly important things the ones you scheduled first? And then scheduled your other obligations around those top priorities, rather than the other way around?
