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The Path Much Traveled

-- By JonathanBrice - 16 Feb 2012

Introduction

This paper is based on a recent conversation I had with Eben while walking to school last Tuesday night.

Problem: There’s no substitute for time

At some point in my conversation with Eben, we turned to the fact that I was perfectly content with working at a firm and “putting in my time”. I was (still am?) under the belief that in order to learn what I needed to learn, so I could do what I wanted to do, I needed to put in my time at a big firm. In the midst of hearing the many reasons why working at a firm was bad for me, Eben made one comment that stuck, “you can never get back time”. Right then, it struck me that THIS is the key problem with the law school to firm system, we never get back the time we put in doing things we don’t necessarily “want” to do; moreover, this time we put in doesn’t necessarily make us better lawyers, or even better prepare us for what we "want" to do. In the end of the day, we could end up spending our 20s and 30s working hundreds of hours a week, and learning very little beyond what the firm wants us to learn. Under the firm system, we merely learn how to be a lawyer at firm X doing specific thing Y.

Solution: Find your inner child

Eben’s solution to this problem was to start one’s own practice. As far as I understood it, the positives of this course of action would be that we would be able to dictate the terms of our learning. By taking this path, we wouldn’t be firm X lawyers who know how to do thing Y, we would be “true” lawyers who could do whatever our clients needed us to do, or at least whatever we wanted to do.

Despite the many positives of this course of action, there are also several major negatives (at least for me). The key negative is the uncertainty that comes with getting off the path so "perfectly" laid out for us. While hearing stories of people who found success by making their own paths always fills us with a sense of pleasure and admiration, actually mustering up the strength and accepting the uncertainty and going against the grain is extremely difficult. At least for me, the key point of uncertainty is “success”--Will I succeed? But instead of attempting to answer that question, we should also recognize the fact that following the path doesn’t guarantee us success, it merely provides us a path.

So in the end, how do we muster up the strength to go against the grain? Find your inner child. At some point (around 6 years old), we stopped thinking about “me” and we started "sharing" and thinking about others. This transition is what essentially makes us do thing like come to/stay in law school when we really don't want to, or follow a path that is clearly bad for us. If we can somehow rekindle our youthful selfishness, and just do what we feel/know is probably best for us, we would be able to easily disregard the path.

Conclusion: We don’t know what we don’t know

In the end, that fact that we truly don’t know what we don’t know will probably keep us at bay. If 80% of the students in this class dont end up working at a firm, I would be shocked. At least for me, I knew the true ramifications of not following the path, I probably wouldn’t mind at least entertaining the though. But the thing about not following a path is that you never truly know. As it stands, while the path does seem likely to lead to disaster, we (I) at least know what that disaster is. As with stories, knowing the ending (or at least the possibility of endings) seems far better than not.

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