When I was 15, I walked into my English class, and on the whiteboard was, “Find out who you are before somebody tells you.” While the board attributed this quote to ‘Anonymous’ we all suspected it was our English teacher being rather blunt with us. I probably should have started thinking about who I was and what I wanted, but instead joined with the rest of the angsty-smarty-pants teens who thought the quote was just an attempt to control us…somehow.
It’s interesting how much I think of that quote now, and how little I thought of it in the years after high school. I attended law school because I was a 20-something smart kid that did not know what he wanted to be, so why not?
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As this song suggests, the reasons are numerous: your true skill is billing people for your time, you work on boring subjects that you could care less about, and my goodness is it soul-crushing. Trading time for money usually is. When we trade time for money, we necessarily put a value on time – which is just absurd. Time is invaluable. It is definitely limited for all of us, and some of us have so much less than others. If you had a commodity, but did not know how much you had, but knew that everyone in the world wanted it, how could you possibly put a price on it? Yet this is precisely what the legal industry does.
During my time in the practice, I did work at a family law firm. Never have I ever seen a more soul-less practice centered around the most intimate parts of human life. In thinking about that time, it strikes me as hopeful that one of the founders of Southwest Airlines was a divorce attorney.
Some fifty or so years ago, Herb Kelleher was a hard-charging, hard-drinking, creative, and zany divorce attorney in San Antonio. As the story goes, one of his clients, Rollin King, came to his office and over drinks, he drew a triangle on a napkin. Each point on the triangle represented the three cities Southwest would connect: Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Herb took the leap because he was bored with the law! He left to pursue something that fit his unique genius – being scrappier, smarter, and just plain odd.
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That Southwest is still seen as the oddball upstart airline despite its $17 billion market cap – which trades on the NYSE under the symbol LUV, is a testament to what can happen when you align yourself with your purpose. When we find the work that is aligned with our most profound vibrations, amazing things can happen.
So, I then took a long look at myself – if you want to change your life, you have to change yourself first. I really dug deep into who I thought I was, how I saw myself, and what I wanted to be doing with my time. The realization that I was simply not aligned with my true self was jarring. But we can all move forward to our true nature, this much I know.
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