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This thread separates today's lecture, where Eben asks a question, from
our attempts at answering it, i.e. our collaborative attempts to frame questions about how to become lawyers that we can carry with us for the next two years ... | |
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< | -- AndrewGradman - 9 Apr 2008
This horizontal line separates this thread, where I attempt to permit us to collaborate to attempt to frame questions about how to become lawyers that we can carry with us for the next two years, from
this thread , where Makalika and I do that collaboratively. Go there. | >
> | Also visit this thread. | | | | |
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< | -- AndrewGradman - 10 Apr 2008 | >
> | -- AndrewGradman - 9 Apr 2008 -- AndrewGradman - 14 Apr 2008
| | | I thought I would put some ideas down to hopefully continue others’ thinking about how to frame questions about how to become lawyers (at least private practice lawyers), and maybe jog others to continue this thread: | | | -- JulianBaez - 14 Apr 2008 | |
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< | I can't snuffle the will of the people, but wouldn't it make more sense not to use a thread whose caption says "don't use this thread?"
Or will the people speak, and snuffle the caption?
-- AndrewGradman - 14 Apr 2008
Oops, sorry, my fault, although in my defense, the following sentence was ambiguous to me, because I couldn't figure out which thread was "this thread":
"This horizontal line separates this thread, where I attempt to permit us to collaborate to attempt to frame questions about how to become lawyers that we can carry with us for the next two years..." In other words, I thought you were ticking off a total of three threads in everything you wrote, when I guess you were referring to only two.
-- BarbPitman - 14 Apr 2008 | | | Julian, I think the answers you are looking for are within you. Hope I don't make you self-conscious here, but after reading your paper about your experience in looking for summer employment, I realize that your go-getter attitude and energy will direct you as close as anyone to that equilibrium that you're looking for while pursuing the four criteria you listed. None or little of this may come with the first job or the second, though. But you'll keep looking. As I hope you know, all life is an experiment.
Just one thing about #4 -- I think this is a spectrum issue, which means that different people have different definitions of autonomy and hence different tolerances, needs, and wants in this area. I gather you are getting the concept of autonomy from Eben's lectures -- I may be wrong, but Eben projects a large amount of autonomy in his working life (we really shade into control issues here), so when he talks about autonomy, he may be talking about a whole different degree or type of autonomy than would fit you. All this by way of saying, I would look at autonomy as an open-ended proposition, and not get stuck on the idea that flat-out autonomy in every facet of a job is the only thing that will make you happy. | | | -- BarbPitman - 14 Apr 2008 | |
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< | Andrew: I didn't see the caption to this thread nor did I find a place on the Wiki where i thought this conversation would be more appropriate. Perhaps you could link in your next comment to the appropriate page and copy/paste the relevant comments there. | | | Barb: I think what you're saying about autonomy is extremely true. To an extent all the questions/criteria are subjective valuations we need to make for ourselves.
Also, I'd like to think the answer is within myself but then I don't see the point to discussing these questions in class. Is the point to make us think about what we actually want? I know I thought long and hard about what I wanted to get from my career before this class. I don't think I'm unique in that regard. | | | I'd be interested in learning if anyone (especially Chris) disagrees with these criteria or proposes additions.
-- JulianBaez - 14 Apr 2008 | |
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> | Julian,
I don't remember Eben articulating the criteria that way. Could you cite or quote the place in the lecture? Here's a quote where I thought he said the OPPOSITE thing:
People decompose the question, "How do I use my skills to have a good life?"
Into a series of competing questions:
Do I use my skills to get …
- a meaningful life?
- paid enough?
- Achieve a work-life balance with respect to the non-work parts of my life I care about?
When the actual question is: how do I used my skills with respect to getting smarts, to give me the work, AND the non-work, that I care about.
I think "work and non-work" are supposed to be read as a single thing -- a series of 24-hour blocks read holistically.
I remember last week you were asking what "marketable skills" we should be acquiring. I am concerned that I am creating a "straw man" out of your question, but as I understood you, I thought you were asking the wrong question. "Marketing," as I heard the term defined, is an act of CREATING or PRE-EMPTING demand. Perhaps one could call it "pre-emption" to take courses in the "skills" currently used by corporate-law-firms, rightly anticipating that the attrition among mid-level associates causes each class of associates to advance, opening up jobs at the bottom. But everyone ENROLLED at a law school already knows that. I think that a more valuable kind of pre-emption is innovative / entrepreneurial / creative, i.e. it asks, "what skills are my classmates NOT acquiring, that will be sorely lacking when I graduate from law school?" such that the demand for those services is much higher. I suspect that among those skills is personability, creativity, irreverence -- the capitalist values that they're teaching at business schools. Therefore I am accumulating a portfolio of watercolor landscapes and expressionist poems.
Seriously, though -- I don't pretend that "foresight" is easy; and persuading other people of one's foresight is even harder ... but that's what I want to get paid for.
-- AndrewGradman - 15 Apr 2008 | | | |
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