Opportunity Management

When I was an undergrad I worked for the school’s property management department.  The job was to be a middleman between students and the repair personnel; students submitted requests to have things fixed after their drunken rampages, and we passed the work orders along to the guys who had to deal with the broken mirror or the sweatshirt-clogged toilet or whatever the problem was. 

I took the job for two reasons: it was one of the highest-paid jobs a student could get on campus, and it gave me preferential treatment in housing choices.  And being an embarrassingly standard college kid, I did the bare minimum of what was expected of me to keep the job and no more.  Consequently, while my bosses liked me well enough, I didn’t learn much on the job or develop any real skills.  The job never became more than what I allowed it to be for me: a stupid little campus gig. 

A good friend of mine held the same position as me, but treated it very differently.  She did more than was expected of her, volunteering for extra responsibilities and figuring out how the operation worked.  She put in full-time hours on top of her classes and got promoted as high as a student could.  When she graduated she took a job at a private property management firm, where she continued to develop her expertise, develop skills, and get promotions.  Now she works during the day and goes to business school at night for a degree in real estate development, with her company footing the tuition bill.  Her future is bright.

As I see it, my friend has done everything right.  And she did it because she had the maturity and the presence of mind to realize the opportunity being presented to her in the moment and not in hindsight.  She saw the campus job as more than just a chance to make some extra money and get a better dorm assignment; she saw it as a springboard into a career and a free graduate degree.  Of course she didn’t see all this coming when she took the job, but that’s the point: she kept her eyes open and figured it out along the way. 

We’re often presented with disguised opportunities like this: the throwaway project the boss delegates to us, for example, or the blog post we don’t feel like doing but have to because we haven’t posted anything in a while.  Each of these is an opportunity to either phone it in or to tackle it with everything we have and exceed expectations.  Choosing the latter is almost always the better bet.

The presence of mind to see opportunities in everything you do is the gift that keeps on giving.  If you don’t have it, start cultivating.

Find Your Stutter

When I was a kid I had a stutter. A bad one: the kind that’s hard not to laugh at even if you’re not the type who laughs at that sort of thing. But I don’t remember people laughing very much. I was lucky enough to have good family and friends who didn’t make it an issue. A pre-kindergarten teacher told me once that if I couldn’t talk right I shouldn’t talk at all, but I don’t remember being particularly bummed out about it, and that’s probably the worst of the treatment I received. And despite that teacher’s suggestion, I kept talking.

Still, though nobody ever really teased me about it (to my face), it was embarrassing. I was a kid with a stutter. It would come up at the worst times, when I was excited or under pressure or trying to respond quickly, and it frustrated the hell out of me. So my parents tried to fix it. During elementary school a speech therapy teacher – a sweet, endlessly patient woman to whom I will be forever grateful – would come and pull me out of class once a week and take me to a little classroom to do corrective exercises. She would have me read out loud and talk to her for about an hour at a time, all the while gently coaching me to slow down, form my mouth this way, breathe that way, helping me get over those tricky letters (M, B, P, S) without straining until I was red in the face.

And it worked. Between her lessons and just growing up, eventually the stutter receded. By the time I got to high school it was basically gone, though even now it’ll still resurface in slight hiccups from time to time. Nothing like it used to be, though. Having a simple conversation is no longer something to be planned for, rehearsed, or dreaded. I just talk.

Fast forward a few years. I’m in my first year of law school. There’s a competition to get on this thing called the Moot Court Board. The competition involves writing a brief about a fictional case and then defending your position in front of a panel of judges, many of whom are practicing lawyers and maybe even a real judge or two. For fifteen minutes or so, it’s just you standing up at a podium trying to argue your case while the judges take turns cutting you off and asking you whatever they want about any aspect of the case that grabs them at the moment. Talking. Out loud. Under pressure. Oh man, I have to do this.

I prepared hard. I studied the case until I knew the facts and the law cold. I wrote every word of what I wanted to say and wrote out answers to potential questions. I practiced in the mirror by myself, to my girlfriend, to my roommate. I worked harder for that competition than I did for any class that year. And it paid off. I went through I-forget-how-many rounds of argument over the course of two days and when they posted the names of the people who made the Board, mine was among them. The stutterer made the Board for people who stand up and talk good. And I didn’t even have Sandra Bullock there to Southern-accent-sassy talk me through it (unless you count my speech therapist, who I guess kind of does count now that I think about it, even though she wasn’t southern, and I never slept at her house).

As far as the world is concerned, my making the Moot Court Board wasn’t a big deal. I didn’t make a lot of money or get famous when my name went up on the announcement board in the student lounge. But for me, it was one of the proudest moments of my life. Using my strengths – organization skills, discipline, the ability to synthesize information and turn it into narrative – I conquered something that had dogged me since I was a kid. I proved I could do it for myself.

And this, I think, is illustrative of the kinds of goals that are worth setting. The personal goals. The goals that force you to confront your weaknesses and figure out how to overcome them with your strengths. The goals that test your will to make yourself the person you want to be, not for applause and awards from the great faceless crowd, but for the look of respect in the eye of the person that stares out at you from the mirror every day. Those, I think, are the goals worth setting and striving for. Those are why we’re here.

On The Merits

If I had to sum this blog up in one sentence, it would be: Do it on the merits.

Take the job because you enjoy the work.  Read the book because you’re interested in the subject.  Be with a lover for love.  Don’t do something to signal, or to fit in, or to stand out, or to get some other secondary benefit.  Do it because it resonates with you in the place that matters.  Do it for the right reasons.  Do it on the merits.

Toward Inside Out

I know quite a few lawyers who seem to base the whole of their identities on being lawyers.  They use legal language in casual conversation, make jurisprudence jokes, and talk about court cases and firms the way people talk about sports games and teams.  It’s who they are.

So what happens if these people, for whatever reason, are put in a position where they can’t practice anymore?  Kablooie – there go their identities.

But identity is a funny thing.  It abhors a vacuum.  And it will fill it with whatever the most accessible thing is.  Art.  Booze.  Whatever’s on hand really.  And when an identity hardens around something, it’s damn hard to chisel it out again.

That’s why it’s important to not let your identity rest too heavily on any one pillar.  Be a lawyer or a writer or whatever your thing is.  But be other things too – a friend and a photographer and a tennis player – and be them just as much. As in the stock market, diversify to spread risk; that way if you can’t do one thing, you’ve got others to fill the identity gap.  Of course, diversifying also means probably not being great at anything – more on that some other time. 

Ideally, I think you want to get to a point where your identity isn’t dependent on anything external at all, on anything you have or do; a point where you base your worth on the values you live by, your integrity, and your character.  When you get there – and this is just a theory – all the rest can fall away.  You’re you, living in the world inside out, and that’s enough.  Baby steps.

The Kundera Principle

“We can never know what to want,

because, living only one life, we can neither

compare it with our previous lives

nor perfect it in our lives to come.”

-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

This quote from one of my favorite novels gets to the heart of the human condition: the difficulty of making decisions about how one should live one’s only life without any way of knowing if the choices we make will lead to *happiness, fulfillment, Heaven, whatever your thing is*, and the angst that creates in us.  We take jobs, take lovers, take chances or don’t, always blind to where those decisions will take us, always wondering what life would be like if we had chosen the alternative.  And for the eloquence with which he explained the dilemma, I call this the Kundera Principle, and it is inescapable.

Still, though the condition may be inescapable, one can hedge against it by doing a few things.  Read biographies.  Acquire mentors.  Network and make friends with all types of people, and stay connected to your family.  Basically do anything and everything that will put you in a position to study lots of different lives being lived in different ways.  Look at the choices people make and the outcomes they bring.  Look for patterns and trends among them.  Then do your best to copy the things that seem to consistently bring what you consider to be positive results, and avoid the things that seem to invite misery.  You’ll still be surprised by variances in outcomes, and by your own feelings throughout the process, but on average you’ll probably do better at dodging life landmines than the person just feeling their way through on intuition alone.   

It might sound cold, but looking at other people as data points in a big experiment can help you navigate through life without having to approach every situation as novel.  With limited time to live in the world, outsourcing experiences is helpful.

The Value of Values

You are a direct reflection of your values and priorities. Aside from the uncontrollable circumstances of where and to whom you were born, what you value and prioritize dictates much of where you are in the world. I’d even say that in most areas of life, those intangibles count for more than genetics. Because every activity you engage in – from reading a book to going to the gym to climbing a mountain – has an opportunity cost. And your values and priorities are what guide you in deciding what costs are acceptable to you as you pursue your goals, and how far you’re willing to go in that pursuit. If you don’t know what your values and priorities are, now’s a good time to start figuring it out; they should be the bedrock of your life, guiding you to the interests that will lead you to the jobs, hobbies, and relationships that will give your life meaning.

Framing your relative position in life in terms of values and priorities creates a wonderful check on jealousy and self-deception, as well as a powerful motivator to improve. For example, when you see the person at the gym that has the body you wish you had, realize that you’re (probably) seeing the end product of specific dieting, exercise, and lifestyle choices. Maintaining that body is a priority for them and has associated costs that they’re values dictate are acceptable. Don’t be jealous, just do what they do. Or don’t and accept that it’s not as high a priority for you as it is for them, and that the two of you have different values.

In the law, the same principle applies to journals and clerkships and jobs. The Editor of the Law Review or the partner with the corner office probably had to sacrifice plenty of things that you might value more than what she has to get where she is. Maybe you’re more relationship- than goal-oriented and would rather spend time with friends and family than burn a Saturday night tightening up citations in a journal article or wrangling clients at a trade association event. So again, don’t be jealous; either do what they do or don’t and wish them well as they pursue values that you don’t share. But be honest with yourself about when it’s a genuine difference in values and when you’re just being lazy; don’t use “value differences” as a copout.

And of course, there will be times when you share the same values and priorities as someone and they’re just more successful than you. Unless you’re Anderson Silva or LeBron James, that’s going to happen. And eventually it will happen to them too. Keep working to be your best, and don’t worry about being the best.

Adopt this mindset and there is no jealousy, just differences and motivating models.