Day 145: Doing the Hard Thing Makes It Easy

Photo by Andreas Weilguny on Unsplash

As I wrote yesterday, lawyers and law students can learn a few things from Graham Weaver’s talk on “how to live an asymmetric life” — a life in which your gains far exceed your losses.

Lesson number one? “Do the Hard Thing.”

You probably know what you’d really like to be doing. The thing that makes you stay up late, full of energy, when you thought you were exhausted. The thing that motivated you to go to law school in the first place.

Why aren’t you doing it?

Simple: It’s hard.

The Path to Burnout Starts in Career Services

Weaver said his strategy out of business school amounted to two time-tested rules: (1) Never lose money; and (2) Never forget rule #1.

That led to playing it too safe. Focusing so hard on any potential downside that he completely missed the dramatic upside.

There’s a law school version of this: On-campus interviews.

Students sign up for on-campus interviews because they’re there. They listen to other students talk about competing for the same law firm jobs, and they start to believe that having one of those jobs defines success.

Think about it: When you decided to go to law school, were you thinking, “I really want to do discovery for a large law firm for ten years?”

Maybe you were. In that case, go for it! You’ll probably make partner in four years.

But for the rest of us, we do the OCIs and take the law firm jobs for one reason:

FEAR.

Not your financial responsibilities, your lack of experience. Those are just other names for fear.

Why Doing the Hard thing makes everything easier

In The Art of Impossible, Steven Kotler describes the stages of achieving “flow,” that mystical state in which time and self seem to disappear and peak performance emerges.

Kotler says the fundamental elements of achieving peak performance are Motivation, Learning, Creativity, and Flow.

Wanting it and sticking with it is essential. Creativity is the juice. Flow is the catalyst.

But learning — “doing the hard thing” — is indispensable.

Yeah, it’s gonna suck at first. You’re gonna suck at first. But the science of peak performance says you have to do the hard thing if you ever want to feel that state where everything feels effortless.

Or, as Thomas Carlyle said, “No pressure, no diamonds.”

Doing the Hard Thing in a law career

So if you’re looking for your first (or next) legal job, take a step back.

Good lawyers know how to spot issues and build work-arounds. But issue-spotting on law school exams usually has a short time horizon,

Have you issue-spotted your own career five or ten years out?

If you do the easier thing, what of your odds of reaching that place where your work and life flow effortlessly, joyfully?

What if you do the hard thing instead?