Blog Posts: Law Blog

We tell ourselves a story about limits, and the story is almost never true. It holds you back even when you have talent or are in the right circumstance. This happens because of people’s fears. Fear is clever that way. It rarely announces itself. It shows up disguised as “I’m just being practical” or “now isn’t the right time,” and because it sounds s...

A few weeks ago, I was standing inside a restaurant by the front door, waiting to be seated with my daughter and extended family in front of me. A man who looked like he might be homeless rode up on a bike, stopped, walked in, and came up quietly behind me. Before I even knew he was there, he put his hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Be the difference you want ...

I learned so much from reading. Which sparks ideas. Try it. That’s really the whole thesis, and I could stop right there, but the old ad line deserves better than a one-sentence drive-by. Reading Is Fundamental was a public service campaign decades before anyone worried about attention spans and doom-scrolling, and it turns out the slogan undersold itself. Readin...

People love to talk about reinvention like it’s some kind of magic trick, like you disappear one day and come back as somebody new. That’s not how it works. You don’t need to become somebody else. Instead, get loud about who you already are. There’s a difference, and it took me years to see it. Reinvention means you must dig past everybody else’s opinion ...

That number should reframe how every professional thinks about a bad day, a lost case, a client who walks, or a deal that falls through. Attorneys in particular tend to carry losses like weight, because the profession trains you to believe that competence means winning, consistently. But the math simply doesn’t support that belief, not even for the best in the wo...

There is a certain kind of professional who makes the whole thing look easy. The attorney who stands up and delivers the perfect argument without seeming to reach for it. The advisor who reads a complicated situation in seconds and somehow already knows the move. Watching people like this, it is tempting to assume they were simply born with something the rest of us...

Nobody puts “number of good friends” on a balance sheet, but maybe they should. Over a career and a lifetime, the relationships you build and protect turn out to matter most in life. I have seen people reach extraordinary professional heights only to look around and realize they did it largely alone and that the summit wasn’t nearly as satisfying as they imag...

Think of yourself as the patient. Your chief complaints include the same routine, the same vacations, the same everything. Your symptoms include days that are the same, vacations that are technically different locations but functionally the same trip, year after year, a vague sense that “someday” you’ll do something different, maybe right after this next busy...

Warren Zevon was dying when he sat down with David Letterman for the last time in 2002. He had been diagnosed with terminal cancer just months before. Letterman, visibly moved, asked him if facing death had given him any special wisdom to share. What Zevon said was simple. He said he had always enjoyed himself, but that the enjoyment was more valuable now. He said ...

AI is not the threat to your career. The threat is the attorney down the street, the consultant across town, or the professional sitting two floors below you who has already figured out how to make AI work for them. That person is not smarter than you. They may or may not have more experience. What they have is a willingness to adapt, and in competitive professions...