| | I watched this video yesterday and thought some of you might also find it relevant to our discussions in class about "splitting" specifically and our career goals more generally. The video is a TEDTalk featuring Larry Smith, an economics professor at the University of Waterloo. The goal of his talk is to explain to people who think they are going to have a great career why they are going to utterly fail at doing so (he says that people looking for "good" careers are also going to fail, but that is because good careers have, in large part, disappeared - all that's left are great careers and careers that are "high work load, high stress, blood sucking, soul destroying").
According to Smith, the way to have a great career is to pinpoint our passion from among our interests and pursue it. The reason we are going to fail at achieving great careers is that we constantly make excuses for not pursuing our passions: great careers are just a matter of luck; geniuses pursue great careers but I am not a genius; people who pursue their passions are strange, obsessive, and weird and I am not those things - I am nice and normal person and nice and normal people don't have passion; I value human relationships more than career accomplishments; if I pursue my passion I won't make a lot of money. If we perpetually use our fears as a shield, he says, we will never achieve great careers. Instead, we will wake up one day in what Tharaud describes as a "what-is-life-really-about? stupor" and have to explain to our children, who have come to us to discuss their own passions, that "I had a dream once too, kid, but I was afraid to pursue it." By that point, it's too late. | | | And just to get out a lingering thought in my mind: I concede the view that law may be seen as merely a vehicle to help carry out our "passion." But then, I couple this idea with the understanding that law is a weak form of social control, the importance for us to "take it to the streets," the need for us to see the "essence of the thang," and wonder -- why am I in law school? I think someone in class brought a similar concern about this when discussing the this beautiful aspect of the law. I'm putting together what I feel have been some of the key takeaways about the law, and it seems like all these concepts raise such introspective questions that no sterile classroom setting can really address them. Indeed, it appears that the most productive way of getting closer to where we want to be professionally is to reflect on our own, away from law school, law professors, and even the law. My guess is that this goes to the idea that law school as an institution as become less about teaching us how to see injustices and do justice versus than how to get a job.
-- LizzieGomez - 29 Mar 2012 | |
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Sanjay, I totally agree with your point that the process of finding a 'great' career requires something more than introspection in isolation. I know that for me, it was only when I had actual experience working at a job where I was comfortable but where I realized I was no longer learning new things every day that I realized that my comfort could more accurately be characterized as complacency. Moreover, while I never had the experience of working until 2 A.M. only to be overtaken by a revelation that I was working for the wrong side, I certainly had a more gradual awakening where I realized that my feelings about my job were mostly sentiments of indifference but most definitely not of passion.
This experience helped to shape the contours of my understanding about what is not a 'great' career for me, but I guess my fear now is that I still don't have a sense of exactly what does constitute a great career. Like Elizabeth, I'm hoping that self-awareness (in my case, self-awareness that I seem to know what I_ don't_ want to do, but not exactly what I actually want to do) is a first step to finding a career I really love. But like you, Elizabeth, I'm also not entirely confident about how to proceed from here. I like Smith's idea that the way to do this is to pinpoint my passion from among my interests and pursue it. I suppose I worry about the possibility that my passion (children's rights) won't translate into a 'great' career, or that I'll choose to pursue the wrong option from among the many possible career choices in the field, and end up in a "what-is-life-really-about" stupor despite my best efforts to avoid that.
In beginning to think through how to overcome this somewhat paralyzing fear, to continue to try to pursue a 'great' career rather than surrender to excuses for failing to do so, I think that our 1L summers will be a really good starting point and I think that everyone above offers important perspective on how to really make the most of our summer experiences. I totally agree with what Eben has said and Meagan reiterated that this summer should be a time to reflect. Sanjay, I think your point about being receptive to new or different endeavors is critical, because you never know which of those new opportunities could open your eyes to an entirely new passion. Sherie, I think that your point relieved some of my anxiety that going to law school wasn't the best way to strive to "be" something I'm passionate about, or that the summer position I accepted was not the best way to facilitate my pursuit of a 'great' career. When you posed the question as to whether the law can be used as the vehicle by which we "do" what we "do," and whether our careers can still be great in serving a separate passion altogether, it resonated with me because I think the answer is yes - so long as, like Lizzie notes, we have the capacity to see "the essence of the thang" or to recognize injustices when we see it.
Ultimately, as Meagan suggests, the beauty of the law is its malleability in serving as a vehicle to effect change and ameliorate that injustice within many disparate fields. And so this summer, I want to make a conscious effort to focus on how exactly the law can be used as a vehicle to effect change within the field about which I am passionate. Furthermore, I want to make a conscious effort to identify and recognize injustices in that field, and to align my aspirations to alleviate those injustices (what I want to "do") with occupational realities (what I want to "be") in the manner that best allows me to pursue a 'great' career.
-- CourtneyDoak - 28 Mar 2012 |
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