Recently my family and I attended a fantastic free science fair event at the baseball stadium at which the San Francisco Giants play.
We were part of a group of thousands of people on a sunny Saturday, getting to not only play and run around on the baseball diamond, but also to participate in tons of science experiments and activities set up on the field and throughout the stadium: Local companies, museums, science institutes and non-profits set up tents and stands educating us all about insects, chemical reactions, robotics, the environment, physics, curing diseases, traveling to Mars and more.
The best advice
One of the participatory exhibits about gravity encouraged my daughter and me to hook a small “ship†made of wooden popsicle sticks powered by a rubber band wound propeller to a thin plastic zip line a few feet off the ground and watch it go.
Seemed simple enough, right?
Well it wasn’t. We wound the propeller the wrong way. We hooked the ship to the zip line the wrong way. We then set the ship off in the wrong direction. We also started on the wrong side of the zip line.
The woman running the exhibit noticed our frustration and finally helped us get set up correctly. As she walked away, she turned and told me that the purpose of this exhibit was not only to learn about the effects of gravity, but also to teach each of us how to learn from our failures.
Learn from our failures
Learn from our failures.
We lawyers are so risk averse. And we often need to be perfect in our practice.
But to leave the law, to make this career shift, to change … we don’t need to be perfect any longer. In fact, we have to make mistakes. We have to fail.
When we fail, we experiment. We try new things. We see what works, and what doesn’t. We test assumptions. We cross certain things off the list, and prioritize others. We become confident in our persistence. We get to know ourselves better.
And as we leave the law behind, we can make mistakes without much harm. Taking babysteps lets us fail and not fall too far, so we can pick ourselves up easily and try again.
My daughter and I finally got it. We tried 5 times. We failed 4 of them.
It’s okay to fail. And I’m on a mission to help attorneys leave the law to become happier, and here’s what I’m doing to help:
Sign up for the free podcast I just launched “Love or Leave the Law” with fellow Leave Law Behind reader, former attorney and published author, Adam Ouellette
Check out the online course I designed specifically to help you begin to leave the law right now at your own pace.
Or schedule a (no charge) time to speak with me to see if my one-to-one coaching is a fit for you.