Are you excited about practicing law? I was, when I started. But it didn’t take long before the thrill was gone.
I liked helping people and I liked the challenge of building something from scratch. But I didn’t love what I was doing.
Is that all there is? Is that all there is? If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing.
I kept going because I had invested so much into my career, how could I walk away?
How could I not? How could I wait twenty years before finally giving myself permission to do something else.
Successful people are passionate about what they do. Monday morning can’t come soon enough. They can’t imagine doing anything else.
Successful people don’t need to push themselves, they do what they do because they love doing it. Steve Jobs said, “If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.”
That’s what I want for you.
I’m not saying you need to leave the law, although that may be the right thing for you at some point. I’m saying you need to find a way to get excited about your work.
How?
In The One Thing You Need to Know, Marcus Buckingham distilled years of research about personal success down to one thing: “Find out what you don’t like doing and stop doing it.”
Get rid of the things you don’t love about your practice so you can do more of what you are good at and enjoy.
It sounds simplistic but imagine if the things you don’t like about your work were gone. Handled. Not something you need to think about.
It would be liberating, wouldn’t it?
Is this possible? Could you delegate or outsource all of the things that cause you stress? Probably not. When you’re in charge, there are always burdens on your shoulders. But if you could get rid of 80% of the things you don’t like, you might smile a lot more.
