I didn’t make more than $40,000 in a year until I was 31. Before law school I did a lot of things – I researched psychology and neuroscience at Harvard, Princeton, and Northwestern, I designed websites for small companies in Portland, I taught the MCAT, I traded for clients’ accounts as a futures broker (it’s …
I’ve been thinking about a river. It’s substantial, quietly powerful. But not insurmountable. And it’s relatable, you can feel something like it flowing in your own body. Graham Duncan described the river this way. On one side is chaos and the other rigidity. One side is entrepreneurship and the other is career stability. Many set …
Writing a book on building a network has been a welcome challenge. I’ve been using muscles I don’t exercise in the course of legal practice. One departure is that projects like this are entirely driven by internal motivation. There are no external deadlines, no clients to satisfy. You have to give yourself milestones. So you …
Continue reading “What lawyers can learn from writing a book”
Part of the reason people tend not to think about building relationships for professional advancement is that the notion of having a relationship seems antithetical to “networking”. We have relationships with friends and family, they’re not our network. So a network is contrived and artificial. Another reason people are deterred from building their professional relationships …
Continue reading “Relationships are a practice, not an outcome”
You’ve identified the attorneys in your area of focus, and you reached out to them. Now what? How do you grow a relationship? It’s about showing up and following up. It’s deceptively simple. But few do this. Let’s see why this is so valuable. I was a BARBRI representative in law school. It was a …
“The computer is a bicycle for the mind”. I always liked this quote, but I didn’t get it. I thought Steve Jobs meant that the computer is like a gym for the mind – a fun place to get exercise. But he’s getting at something precise and profound, and it’s a great way to see …
In an effort to slow my reading down and think deeper about what makes for effective writing, I’m taking notes on what makes for an effective passage. Here are the first few paragraphs from How to Win Friends and Influence People. Note that this reads more like ad copy than a book. It works. During …
Continue reading “Reading Slower: How to Win Friends and Influence People”
So, you’re in law school and you want a job at a law firm or to work in-house. To get the job you want, you shouldn’t only focus on grades. Developing relationships with attorneys is at least as important. Don’t be suckered into thinking that the only thing that matters in law school are grades …
Continue reading “How to talk to attorneys to get the job you’re looking for”
A lot of people don’t like dating. You hear a lot of gripes about how people were weird on a first date, how the first date had logistical snafus, that the lack of follow-through was a let-down. I have friends that planned very thoughtful experiences – some show that has a musician you think they’d …
There are great tactics in this book. But it doesn’t have a solid foundation. The book has a good reframe of how to approach negotiation, moving from positions (“I want to pay $X for my new house”) to interests (“I can only pay for this from the sale of my house”). Negotiating from interests is …