As a young lawyer, there are many mistakes yet to be made and many lessons yet to learn. I love Ted Lasso, so I’m going to paraphrase one of his lines – There’s two buttons a young lawyer should never hit: that’s the panic and the snooze. It’s so easy for young lawyers to panic, and kind of understandable why they do, compared to someone with 15 or 20 years of practice. Never panic. All of that great decision-making ability and knowledge that you have goes right out the window when you panic. I can’t tell you the number of nights’ sleep that I lost as a young lawyer because I panicked – and it never helped anyway!
It’s also not a good idea to snooze. Of course get a good night’s sleep every evening, but when you are at work stay focused and keep pushing forward, I can assure you your competition is.
Some key advice is to love the process, and the process will love you back. Many times when I was developing either my attorney skillset or client development plan, I made the mistake of looking down the road, and worrying about whether I was doing “it,” whatever “it” was, correctly. Making sure that you’re getting it right is certainly important, but not at the expense of executing on your plan daily, and as you’re executing it, really enjoying it.
If you’re doing something, whether it is the practice of law, selling insurance, or whatever the endeavor is, and you’re not truly enjoying it, you should stop immediately and find something else to do, because you will never be happy, and therefore never truly successful. We get to do this once. What a shame it would be for you to live someone else’s life!
