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Why it's hard for me to be creative | | | It’s not that this process is entirely without any utility. It’s just that it requires little, if any creativity. This structure does do one thing very well--it makes us all really good, I mean really good, at following directions. Which means for most of our professional lives, our work will only be as good as the directions that precede it. | |
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> | So, now that you've been through the process so many times, and
floated to the top each time, what have you got left to prove? In
the military, fruit salad puts an officer's entire service history on
her uniform. Within a totalizing organization, where promotion is
the only form of career path possible, until it stops, that's the
whole story told precisely and completely.
But—here's where the creativity thing begins—human
society is not necessarily like the military. Your pathway isn't
linear like that any more. Only those who cannot tolerate the
complexity of making their own decisions must remain within the
boundary of directions. All others have a choice. The form the
choice takes is called "creativity." The most basic form creativity
takes is the creation of one's own life. This happens by conscious
transcendence of the patterns imposed by our insecurities, our
shames, and the unintended consequences of our past successful
efforts to mend our psychic wounds.
The ability to do creative lawyering—to make things happen in
society, using words, that haven't happened before—includes,
necessarily, the ability to perform that task for oneself, by making
a career happen in society, using words, that is not other-directed.
The crucial learning necessary is learning not to be afraid of
creating your own practice. It is not an exam. It is your practice.
You do write your own questions, by developing your various
expertises, and by choosing your clients. Your mistakes are scored
against you, and you try not to make any serious ones.
At the beginning, you need mentoring, which must come from the other
asset of your practice besides the license, which is your network.
Your network has to contain the necessary mentoring, delivered
usefully, to enable you to grow your practice at the beginning. You
should be expecting the law school, in return for the large amount of
borrowed money you are paying it, to help you build the network and
get the mentoring. (The best possible mentors would be powerful,
experienced, effective and respected leaders of the profession, who
might be expected to be the faculty. If not, at least the faculty
should be actively introducing you to them. What they ought _ not_
to be doing is hiding in their offices, demanding a "specific
question" at office hours, giving true/false final exams, writing
recommendation letters that reveal an absence of personal knowledge
of and contact with the student, etc.)
But you also need the inner freedom to create. That's made of
several important parts. You need to have been taught to put away
the fear of failure. You need to learn alertness to social phenomena
that could lead to expertise for you that would attract clients. You
must be able to communicate and collaborate effectively in
21st-century social conditions, using the new modes of social process
that have grown up in the brief life so far of the Net. You must
understand the fundamentals of independent professional life in the
"Internet society." You need teachers who can help you learn these
things.
The alternative you propose, that everyone will be part of
hierarchical organizations issuing orders for other-directed careers,
will not be available in your lifetime. That it has been available
is no guarantee of its continuance. You should not educate yourself
to play a role in that world, because you will find yourself unsuited
to the one in which you are actually going to live. | | | | |
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