There is a very critical distinction between hard cases and bad cases, and understanding this makes the difference between professional excellence and professional mediocrity. Or worse. To understand the difference, let’s first revisit Professor Czikszentmihalyi’s seminal teachings about flow. Flow is that state of existence where time loses meaning and you are in a zone…
One of the things that retired professionals do is get together and commiserate about the good old days. And the bad old days. Because of my research into the reasons why some professionals seem to experience more joy and success than others, I often ask, “What would you have done differently if you could go…
There must be ten thousand things I loathe about Donald Trump, but of all of them the one which most disqualifies him from being in charge of a hot dog stand, let alone a country, is his habit of throwing his staff and advisors under the bus. He spends most of his waking moments braying…
There are lots of ways to destroy your professional life, but few are more terrifying than loose cannons. In the old days of sail, cannons were mostly below deck and were securely chained in place, with enough slack to account for recoil. From time to time a weak link in a chain would snap after…
One of the thorniest issues in most professional firms is the parceling out of profits amongst the partners or principals. And no single factor is more distracting from the mission of building a powerful, profitable, and reputation-driven firm. Almost invariably this problem arises when the partners have different perceptions of their respective importance, and in…
Ask me, I’m an expert. Anything you want to know about burnout. Been there, done that. To be sure, burnout is not always something that can or should be avoided. Almost every student in professional school ends the exam period completely drained in body, mind and spirit. Those who fight forest fires twelve hours a…
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, better known by his honorific Mahatma, was one of history’s greats, certainly a towering figure of the twentieth century. By profession he was a lawyer, but he wasn’t particularly good at lawyering. His first case, in his own words, went like this: “This was my début in the Small Causes Court. I…
Zak and Amanda were pretty new to real estate sales, young, eager, and ready to make some good money. And, as happens with most agents at that stage, they ended up doing “open houses” on a regular basis. Also as it happened, their broker knew a thing or two about open houses. He knew that…
You know the little guy on the wheel who races and races and races, never to advance an inch? Or the other little white rat who presses the peddle time after time after time, each press giving him a tiny shot of nicotine? We all feel superior, of course, to the caged white rats repeatedly…
This is a true story about a law firm in another universe, far, far away. The names have been changed to protect the innocent, if there were any innocents. The third item on the partners’ meeting agenda was “Letterhead”. Innocuous enough, one would think, but not to the eighteen men and women around the table….