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TEDTalksWhyYouWillFailToHaveAGreatCareer 4 - 29 Mar 2012 - Main.SanjayMurti
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| | I watched this video yesterday and thought some of you might also find it relevant to our discussions in class about "splitting" specifically and our career goals more generally. The video is a TEDTalk featuring Larry Smith, an economics professor at the University of Waterloo. The goal of his talk is to explain to people who think they are going to have a great career why they are going to utterly fail at doing so (he says that people looking for "good" careers are also going to fail, but that is because good careers have, in large part, disappeared - all that's left are great careers and careers that are "high work load, high stress, blood sucking, soul destroying").
According to Smith, the way to have a great career is to pinpoint our passion from among our interests and pursue it. The reason we are going to fail at achieving great careers is that we constantly make excuses for not pursuing our passions: great careers are just a matter of luck; geniuses pursue great careers but I am not a genius; people who pursue their passions are strange, obsessive, and weird and I am not those things - I am nice and normal person and nice and normal people don't have passion; I value human relationships more than career accomplishments; if I pursue my passion I won't make a lot of money. If we perpetually use our fears as a shield, he says, we will never achieve great careers. Instead, we will wake up one day in what Tharaud describes as a "what-is-life-really-about? stupor" and have to explain to our children, who have come to us to discuss their own passions, that "I had a dream once too, kid, but I was afraid to pursue it." By that point, it's too late. | | | I totally agree with your proposition that the law could simply be a tool that we choose to use to serve our own passions. I think this speaks to what Eben says about the beauty of the law lying in the fact that it is one of the weakest forms of social control. Statutes and judicial pronouncements on their own are powerless. As Alexander Hamilton said, the judiciary “has no influence over either the sword or the purse; nor direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever…[it has] neither force nor will, but merely judgment.” The laws and the government bodies that posit and interpret them are, on their own, extremely weak. They only have the power that our social compact chooses to accord them through affirmation, respect and adherence. I think legal beauty lies in its inherent weakness because its power and efficacy is really at the mercy of undoubtedly social forces. It is therefore capable of evolving and growing with human values, at times preempting a turning of the tides and at others re-molding to adapt to existing ground-level realities. While you can obviously pursue your passion outside the law, the law is valuable as a malleable vehicle - if we know when and where to exert the right amount of pressure - through which to propel our passions forward towards eventual realization. Whether your interest lies in the environment, health care, LGBT rights or international governance, knowledge of the law and the human context in which it operates and is given force could be immensely useful if applied strategically and appropriately. I think Eben is right that our 1L summers should be a time for self-reflection. If we haven’t yet discovered what outrages or inspires us, there is no better time than now to do so. For those of us who see the law as an ideal path for pursuing these passions, we can then return in the fall and begin to piece together the puzzle of how to capitalize on the weaknesses inherent in the legal structure to extract a strength and force capable of bolstering and promoting our individual career goals.
-- MeaganBurrows - 28 Mar 2012 | |
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I think we've all heard some variant of this advice at some point - find your passion, do what you love, follow your dreams. Larry Smith definitely sells it well in the video above. Perhaps I'm making excuses, but I'm not convinced that it's great advice in isolation.
First, the things we are passionate about don't necessarily lead us to a specific career choice. I'm passionate about technology, but that doesn't really narrow my options for a career. I can be a programmer, a lawyer, or a writer and still find a way to incorporate my interests (although that may be a bad word for Smith).
Second, the process of finding the career you want requires more than pure introspection. I'm a firm believer that you can't know if you will love doing something until you actually do it. I'd argue that it is more important to be open to new opportunities and passions than to try to lock yourself into the ones you think you already have.
Lastly, I once received advice I liked from a partner at a big law firm with a bad reputation. He told me that I would know I was on the right track with my career when I went into work and continued to learn new things. Once I stopped learning, I would have a job and a reason to do something else.
-- SanjayMurti - 29 Mar 2012 |
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