External Validation and the the Success Trap

[I would like to continue revising this essay throughout the summer.]

Our class’s discussion of grades stood out as the most emotionally resonant exchange I witnessed anywhere at Columbia during our 1L year. The discussion’s emotional character was rooted, I think, in the fact that we were not just discussing law school grades as an evaluative mechanism. We were discussing the broader system of self-validation that has guided (and perhaps trapped) many of us for our entire life. As Anne Steinberg’s recent paper on grades and motivation suggests, we confronted law school grades as symbols of a deeper psychological conflict.

For many of us, learning to ignore grades constitutes more than a process of adopting a more rationale system of self-evaluation in our legal careers. It means moving from a system of external validation to a system of self-validation for the first time in our lives. I and many of my colleagues (particularly those who went directly from undergrad to law school) have never been forced to develop a capacity for internal validation.

A Columbia Law student, almost by definition, has excelled at any evaluative mechanism thrown at her. She has mastered standardized tests and earned great grades, likely from a young age. She may have attended one of the world’s most prestigious colleges. She may have worked for renowned consulting agencies or staffed an influential legislator. For almost all of us, institutionalized evaluation has meant little more than an ongoing pat on the back. Few of us have developed any ability to evaluate our lives on our own terms. I cannot really blame us for this failure; it is hard not to love evaluation systems that amount to masturbation.

We have grown up in a world with more varied and weighty systems of formal, institutionalized evaluation than ever. We need to understand that such systems can trap successful kids just as they can suppress struggling students. While struggling classmates learned to appreciate themselves in a world that didn’t always appreciate them, we skated from success from success, blind to our failure to develop a capacity for independent self-evaluation. This failure, I think, can function as a coercive push toward ill-considered life choices just as surely as the same metrics can punish kids with learning disabilities. Many of us, in short, are addicted to formalized success.

And so in this course when we were confronted with fundamental questions like “Why should grades matter?” and “Why do you want to be a lawyer?” we instinctively fell into a defensive crouch. We were reacting to a challenge not just to our approach to law school, but life. I do not want to impute too many of my own feelings to my classmates (I certainly know some who are entirely self-validated, unconcerned with grades, and passionate about becoming lawyers for specific, great reasons), so I would like to briefly comment on my own path into and out of law school.

Like many of us in college, I was a political science major with good grades and no real plan. I was passionate about making an impact but had no idea how. Friends and mentors began to recommend I consider law school, as mentors seem inclined to recommend to every directionless but vaguely successful liberal arts student. I took a few pre-law courses; I enjoyed them, but quickly realized that my brain did not find legal reasoning very stimulating. But as graduation marched closer I began to crave another formalized path of guaranteed success after college. I was never particularly concerned with money. In retrospect, I was simply looking for another fix of external validation, an institutionalized guarantee of more pats on the back. I signed up for the LSAT the summer before my senior year. I was still not truly interested in becoming a lawyer but saw no harm in taking a test. In a crescendo of external validation, not unlike a euphoria-inducing hit, I found myself with a perfect score and a full scholarship to Columbia Law School; I never thought twice.

I realize now that I never actually decided to become a lawyer. I wanted more validation, and the prospect of Columbia Law School gave it to me. I drifted through the first semester of law school disinterested in academics for the first time in my life but unsure why. As we began our second semester, my boredom and dissatisfaction become more acute. But (in a testament to my fixation on continued external validation) the thought of not continuing law school honestly never crossed my mind.

Finally, when Professor Moglen asked us “Why do you want to be a lawyer?,” I found myself without a good answer. And over the following weeks I first allowed myself to provide an honest answer to the question: “I don’t.” Slowly, I came to decide that my first year in law school would be my last. To my surprise, the decision felt uplifting, not discouraging. I believe it was the first decision I ever made based entirely on an internal, independent sense of validation.

I do not intend to encourage my classmates to leave law school. Our class if full of talented, confident individuals who will become great lawyers. And many, if a few less, will make for happy lawyers. But as I discussed my own decision with my colleagues, a concerning number replied something like “I kinda feel the same way. But man, I just can’t imagine pulling the trigger on a decision like that.”

I want only to suggest that, in this highly institutionalized society, the successful can be trapped by addiction to external validation just as the less fortunate can be beaten down by a shortage of the same. I hope that we can all find the power to live our lives freely, confident enough to validate our choices internally, whether such validation points us toward or away from the law.