Career Advice

I speak to students (undergraduate, graduate, professional, etc.) from time to time and thought it might be useful to distill my guidance and advice: 

Goals matter. What are your goals? To get a (any?) job? To get your dream job? To get a job with a reasonable work-life balance and healthcare? To become a CEO or an organizational leader?  To earn a seven-figure exit.  To make a dent in the universe?  To help others (perhaps while maintaining a reasonable work-life balance, etc.)?  To maximize learning?  Depending on the goals, the advice and guidance ought to vary (greatly). 

Start early.  Create a plan.  Talk to people in the field or practice.  Interview them.  Write on the topic of interest.  Start a blog.  Find an internship.  You may decide that a given area is not for you.  Better to learn sooner than later.  Experience is cumulative, meaning that one activity or skillset builds on another.  Start logging your hours (see below). 

10,000 hours. Coined by Gladwell (Outliers), the concept here is that you need to log (quality) hours before achieving mastery in any discipline.  For Gladwell, it was the Beatles, before becoming famous, playing bars and clubs in Dusseldorf seven days a week.  Closer to home (for me), it’s a technology transactions law associate logging 2,000 hours per year for five years, working on a variety of complex deals.  Of course, nothing magical happens when you cross the 10,000 hour threshold.  Rather, you need to put in substantial hours become you can be effective in any endeavor. 

Relationships and networks matter (but not for the reasons you might think).  Networks enable information exchange (on unpublished job openings, which classes to take, how to best approach a given professor, who is the best supplier for a given service, etc.) and thus broaden your perspective.  Networks help you learn from others, as opposed to your own mistakes (although this is inevitable).  Effective leaders have rich and varied networks.  Drawing again upon Gladwell (Tipping Point), are you a Paul Revere or a William Dawes?  Attorneys (and others) tend to move in packs.  A partner leaves a firm and brings with her two, three, or four associates.  An in-house attorney leaves for another in-house role and a year or two later others attorneys who had worked closely with that attorney follow suit.  It pays (literally!) to be known quantity.  Last, but not least, a few years ago a lunch with a business school classmate lead to an introduction to a local education non-profit, on whose board I now sit. 

Better to be lucky than good, but also better to graduate at the top of your class than not.  Generally, it remains an immutable truth that if you would like to have any chance of landing a job at a top large law firm, you need to finish at the top of your class after your first year of law school.  Put otherwise, superior academic achievement can provide options, but, if, for example, you cannot get along well with the other attorneys or do not show sufficient maturity during your summer associate position, you will not get the post-graduation offer. 

Mentors are good, executive sponsors are better. I have been a mentor and in turn have had a few mentors.  A mentor provides advice, guidance, information, perspective, and empathy.  An executive sponsor finds you (with your help) in a crowded room, grabs you by the shirt collar, and says, “Let’s go!”  Within a large organization, and generally, having an executive sponsor is essential, based simply on the law of large numbers.  Robert Caro, who has written extensively about power and, indirectly, organizational behavior and dynamics, highlights the importance of executive sponsors in the development and progression of Robert Moses (Al Smith) and LBJ (FDR, Sam Rayburn, Richard Russell).  Generally, managers are not executive sponsors. 

Be Flexible (and Intentional).  A career of 20, 30, 40, or 50 years is a long time, an ultra-marathon, not a 5k race.  I am always intrigued by individuals with career linearity (I am not one of them), but, almost invariably, there are bends in the road, and sometimes you need, or feel compelled, to change directions.  Whether and when to make that pivot is usually only best discernable in hindsight.  In college, I was a premed major.  Both my grandparents were medical doctors, and my mom had worked as a medical technician.  I had not known any other career paths and had not invested building a network to help learn about other options (see item #4). Needless to say, after a few application cycles, medical school was not meant to be.  I worked for a few years after college and then enrolled in law school.  The rest is history.  In retrospect, there were probably a few non-traditional paths, including master’s programs that served as springboards for medical school and international (M.D.) programs, but I did not pursue those.   But, even if I had, there is nothing to say that I would be practicing medicine now.  Medical doctors (Chekov, Bulgakov) become writers, lawyers become doctors, writers (Grisham, Turow), and life coaches, researchers and bilingual secretaries become writers (Rowling), and community organizers, actors, and businessmen become presidents. 

Write, Write, and Write Some More.  The importance of this cannot be understated.  How you communicate says as much as, if not more than, about you as anything.  White papers and memos are replacing Powerpoint presentations.  To be a good writer you need to be a voracious reader. More on this in a future post.

Embrace politics. Every organization, and everyone, is political.  This makes us human. Advocate for yourself, be persistent (to a point and always tactful), and identify potential executive sponsors. 

Try to have fun. As mentioned above, this is an ultra-marathon. Travel. Try to enjoy the journey. 

Comments welcomed.