Forget this rubbish:
"Markets reward risk." As if
Thought was *magical!*

Capitalism
Isn't sold as good exchange
But as charity.

How many cases Could I have briefed in this time? Shit. I gotta run.

-- AndrewGradman - 15 Apr 2008

Andrew: I can not cite where Moglen gave these criteria, but I remember hearing them in about the same area you are quoting. I did not mean to suggest those goals are necessarily competing values. Instead I meant to suggest we should try to find work which will fulfill all our needs instead of just some (i.e. a firm job that allows us to live comfortably but gives us no happiness, balance or autonomy).

As for your marketability question, I would imagine its figuring out which skills are desirable. Its true garnering the same skills as the rest of the class will not separate us from the crowd, but being a skillful expressionist poet does not enhance our marketability unless we get the market to demand that skill.

However, some skills gained may be enjoyable to acquire in and of itself rather than for its future utility. So if you want to learn to be an expressionist poet lawyer, than go ahead. Perhaps it will become useful in the future. I thinks that's unlikely though.

-- JulianBaez - 15 Apr 2008

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

Here are the list of criteria Barb referenced which I put up before.

1.Making enough money to live comfortably, however we define it (I assume this includes paying off our loans) 2.Doing work we enjoy and find meaningful 3.Having a work/life balance we are happy with 4.Autonomy (I think is the most unnecessary criteria if we already have a work/life balance but I guess its possible to have one without the other).

I credit Eben with articulating the criteria this way. It more or less matched my internal goals, except mine were more specific to fit my desires (i.e. how i define living comfortably).

I'd be interested in learning if anyone (especially Chris) disagrees with these criteria or proposes additions.

-- JulianBaez - 14 Apr 2008

Christopher, Julian put his list of 4 things up there, then said, "These are a perfect set of criteria." The problem is that one doesn't know how these criteria actually pan out in a real job in an industry with which one is not familiar until one is IN the job. Then, if one is already too married to the idea of "perfection," it is likely that the real-life dynamics of a job will create disappointment. Kind of like when people make single-and-looking posts that describe what they are looking for in a relationship -- the more they are wed to any set of criteria, especially made in the form of defined entries on a list, the more they will remember the items that they thought about and then internalize the idea that it is that list or bust. And the more likely they will never feel satisfied, demonstrated by leaving one job for another, which leaves them looking for perfection indefinitely.

-- BarbPitman - 14 Apr 2008

In other words, Eben basically says that we can't go to a big firm (interpreted often as the making of big money) and at the same time be happy. That may be true, but find out for yourself first. You can always tell Eben "you told me so." And I think most people would rather be in that position than be in the position where they muse, "But only if . . ." I find most people regret the things they didn't do, not the things they did do. And as you know, life after the big firm interlude (should you choose that route) can yield much in the form of additional perspective as well.

-- BarbPitman - 14 Apr 2008