Non Compete

Twice a year, Google starts directing a whole bunch of people to this site in response to queries about "law school grades" or "bad grades law school" or "should I drop out of law school."  I have posts here and here about law school grades.  If you have advice or encouraging words for frantic law students wondering what to make of their grades, it's worth dropping by, because the posts continue to attract fresh comments. 

I started out writing a post about my rivals for the top slot in law school; how different all of our approaches were.  It turned into a reflective narrative about competition, because although there were four of us in the running, I felt the whole time as though there was only one other person who was a serious competitor.  I think that says a lot more about the psychology of rivalry than about anything the merits of the other two guys with great grades.  Anyway, after I wrote all that I realized it wasn't really what I wanted to say.   

I'm really competitive by nature and as I get older I've been trying not to let it control me.   I know that I need to give it appropriate outlets (I race my sailboat to win, I aim to beat my chess opponent) or else it manifests in areas of my life where it doesn't belong and I find myself comparing my life choices and my outcomes and my process to other people as though we were competitors.  I think I'm getting much better at this.  It's one reason I didn't go work at BIGLAW -- I didn't think I'd be strong enough to resist comparing myself to dozens or hundreds of other smart, ambitious associates, and I knew doing so, daily, would lead me to a life that didn't make me happy. 

My mom wrote me an email yesterday in which she said she admired the way I seem to be genuinely whole and happy regardless of my professional status.  I think she's right, and I'm proud of that, too.  Leaving my law firm has been part of this growth process for me.  I think while I was working there I had a pretty rich outer life, but I don't think I knew quite how much of my own identity was wrapped up in my job title.  That's part of what's been going on on this blog, that frustrates some of my readers.  I have professional goals and ambitions -- more clear now than they've ever been, although I'm choosing not to write about them -- but they are only a piece of who I am.  And they're nobody else's goals.  I feel like I've been unhooking from a whole lot of things over the last six months, habits of thought I didn't even know I had.  Unhooking from other people's expectations and from my own competitive response to those.  And unhooking from my sense of the world, and this life, as some kind of contest, in which I'm either ahead or behind.  There is so much richness in life, so many facets, so many things to be interested in.  Writing about them is my way of celebrating a world full of possibility. 

If you got bad grades last semester, I wish you good luck turning them around next semester.  It is very possible.  I did it.  But what I wish you the most luck in is charting a path that really fits you.  I think that's possible, too.  It seems harder than getting good grades, though.  I'll keep you posted. 

Comments

[tph]

I'm looking for a new job right now after having left a small law firm after nearly two years, and I have to admit that I'm still caught up in the job title. And there are some things that I think I'd like to do that require the license, though none of them has seized me in such a way that I feel I must do that work.

Even so, I haven't yet been able to articulate what I want to do well enough to state it without falling back on the "attorney" label. I still find myself just looking within law because that's what I've trained to do and that's where I know I can probably make enough money to pay off the ol' law school loans. I like thinking and talking about the law casually -- I'm a "law nerd" -- but that's very different from working with the law professionally. I could be happy without working with the law professionally, as long as I were doing something that I felt was worthwhile and sufficiently challenging.

I am not particularly competitive, yet I worked mostly in litigation for nearly two years. I have perfectionist tendencies and like to do well at what I do, but I just couldn't get excited about the contest of litigation the same way that others I worked with did. Now I need to find something that will inspire me to get out of bed in the morning.

By the way, I lived in Portland for two years as a kid and visited there again this summer. It's a lovely area. I often miss having the ocean nearby. And trees. Oh, how few trees there are in Colorado.

[Yeoman]

Good for you in being able to decouple yourself the attorney identity label. It's tough.

I've had a really hard time of it. Funny thing is, I never was that keen about the law in the first place, but some deep fear of failure kept me driving on, and now I'm so far in that getting out if really tough. On top of it, in some odd way, a person's profession becomes their "occupational identity", and in some cases, (and particular, I think, with men) it begins to define who and what they are. I wished I'd heeded the clairion call to get out of the field when I first started, when it would have been so much easier.

FWIW, I received a "should I quit" email recently too, and have also posted a thread related to it. In spite of what I presonally feel regarding my own situation, as posted there, I'm not in any real position to offer anyone else advice.

Well, sigh. . .16 years in and counting, off to the days activities.