Find work and a life beyond the billable hour.
People often mistake their thoughts and beliefs as actual truths. Yet it’s often not so. Our beliefs are not necessarily the gospel from on high, let alone the entire truth. But so many lawyers fervently believe that work can’t be fun, that they can’t make money doing something they love, or that they have no marketable skills aside from law.
Since 2007, the default font for Word has been Calibri, not Times New Roman. That’s a decade, people. The last version of Word that defaults to Times New Roman debuted in 2003. Possibly, you might want to appear a little more current than clinging to a 14 year-old default.
More fundamentally, lawyers (and many, many others) cling to certainty because then, they can delude themselves that they are safe. Or as Brené Brown says, certainly keeps us from feeling vulnerable. Lawyers in particular loathe vulnerability. They’ll do damn near anything to avoid that chest-tightening feeling.
This fact of 6 good hours of brain work has some fairly serious implications for lawyers and their worship at the maw of the Billable Hours God. As I’ve said before, lawyers act like they are factory workers selling billable hour widgets, but really, their value is in the brilliance and quality of their work, not the amount of hours spent with nose to grindstone. With routine 10-hour days and 65-hour work weeks at BigLaw and elsewhere, lawyers overall are exhausted, making them functionally as impaired as a drunk, and therefore doing a crap job for their clients.
As I’ve written about several times (here, here, and here, for starters), perfectionism is an especially strong demon for most
Unhappy lawyers often think that their problem is simply their horrible job. But there’s also another truth at work: Some of the horridness of your job stems from your own toxic attitudes. ttorneys, and lots of other people, tend to think that their attitudes about money, mistakes and certainty are truth, when really they’re a choice about how you view the world.
When you’re on the verge of something big and momentous, the gremlin, aka inner lizard, often shows up with a monstrous splash. That’s what a Lack Blitzkrieg is.
It is difficult to explain how and why I left my job as an attorney without first explaining how and
Lawyer misery is depriving us of a lot of talent and energy that would be much better used to improve
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.
