Find work and a life beyond the billable hour.
I particularly don’t believe in lazy when it comes to people who managed to make it through an academic career with the grades to get into law school, to get through law school, and to get through the bar exam.
What I do believe in is fear. One way or another, fear is the root of behavior that we misguidedly call laziness.
A personal brand isn’t about creating some fictitious persona. It’s about creating a reputation for yourself about attributes that matter to you. What do you want to be known for? Your brand should emphasize not just your strengths, but the strengths you care most about. Figure out what those are, and you are on your way to an authentic, useful personal brand.
I’m here to tell you, I have yet to hear of a profound spiritual experience that directs you to keep slogging at a job you loathe, or that you have to medicate yourself to bear.
So here we are on the threshold of a new year, when everyone gets their panties in a twist about changing their lives for the better. Now, I am a big advocate of change that makes your lives happier and more fulfilling. It’s just that most people go about it bass-ackwards.
Looking first and foremost for the high pay, without delving into the messy reasons you aren’t happy in law, is following the same path that got you into law in the first place. Sooner (usually) or later, you will be at this same point again, just with a different job title.
I view following our interests and joys as giving the Universe more material and opportunities to work some seeming magic in our lives. If you stay really firmly in your narrow rut of to-do lists, it is just harder for those coincidences—which aren’t really coincidences at all—to happen.
being in an environment that pushes you way past your default personality traits can make you hostilejudgmental, anxious, brittle and impatient. You can find the job that aligns really well with your purpose and gives your life meaning, but if the daily environment doesn’t match your personality needs, you’ll end up stressed and possibly confused about why.
Stuck in the office for the rest of your life? Time to create beach reading time for yourself, even if your only travel plans are to and from the office for the foreseeable future. If you really want to embrace the idea, put on your bathing suit and find an umbrella to sit under. At the very least, get a cold drink, stick a tacky paper umbrella in it, curl up on the couch, and put your nose into a book for a few hours.
Lawyers often confuse freedom with safety and security. Freedom is not either of those things. It’s a feeling of exhiliration, maybe even edged with a little fear. You’ll know it’s freedom because it doesn’t feel like imprisonment. So often, lawyers feel they must keep that safe job, especially in this economy. But if they picture themselves leaving, whether they intend to or not, they nearly always tell me that it’s like a weight rolls off them. That weight is the weight of imprisonment.
My own view is that often, creatives arrive in Lawyerland because pattern recognition is also an important part of analytic thinking. I can’t tell you the number of clients I’ve had who tell me they just can’t take a job that doesn’t require analytic skills. They say that they get huge satisfaction out of analyzing problems and finding solutions. Some of those clients really are meant to use those pattern recognition skills as a lawyer does, but most of them, not so much. What they crave, but don’t understand they crave, is using pattern recognition in creative ways.
