The two books that every young lawyer needs to read… (Comprehensive Guide - Part 1)

When I was at school in Sixth Form I decided I wanted to be a commercial barrister. Age 16, having only recently completed my GCSEs, I was convinced that was what I wanted to do. I remember also being certain that the job of a commercial barrister was perfectly aligned with the skills that I had acquired after a few short years of formal education.

I was good at subjects which involved essay writing and I liked public speaking. I understood, in very broad terms, that being a commercial barrister involved reading, writing and speaking in court, and I  also learned from a few internet searches, that it was lucrative.

That was the issue of my career solved. All I had to do was emulate the CVs of the commercial barristers that I had read about online and I reasoned that I could seamlessly translate the things I had been good at in school into a lifelong fulfilling career.

And in 2007 that logic wasn’t just the reasoning of a child. That equation was reinforced by teachers and parents and basically every adult I spoke to about my future plans.

·        Double down and work hard at the things you have shown an early aptitude in.

·        Try and mirror the CVs of those that have gone before you as closely as possible.

·        Find a way to monetise that skill set as soon as possible after university and then keep working at that same skill (ideally until you retire).

And so, age 16, I set out on a series of educational and professional steps in an effort to become a practicing barrister, at the very earliest, at the age of 25.

In other words, I committed 9 years of my life to joining a specific profession on the basis of an inference I made, age 16, that I might be competent at it.

In legal terms, the evidential basis for that inference (being GCSEs and a few school plays) was fairly limited. And crucially, I wouldn’t get to experience the thing I was aiming to be, to test drive it, or experience the day to day reality of it, until I had already completed all the required training in order to do it.

Now clearly the impact of the career decisions we make at school are often not quite as stark as that.

First, many of the things that I did in those 9 years I was probably going to do anyway. I was already going to do the A-Levels I had some kind of aptitude for and I was probably always going to want to go to university. Second, along the way, I was able to gain some brief insight into what a commercial barrister did through work experience and talking to people who did it, and so I did incrementally learn a bit about the job I was training for. Finally, I could have changed my mind at any point (albeit with financial implications).

However, the key point that I have only realised in the last year, age 32, and 16 years on from that first decision was how wildly underequipped I was, and perhaps many of us are, to make good and informed decisions about our careers.

***

I read two books at the start of 2023 that changed my entire perspective on how I think about my career.

And the most striking thing was that when I finished them I was convinced that only a very small number of people I know are aware of the ideas that these books contain.

In fact, despite being lucky enough to know a fair number of people who have experienced professional success, especially in the legal world, I suspect very few of them have ever consciously considered the approaches to career development that these books recommend.

The books are ‘Love+Work’ by Marcus Buckingham and ‘Designing Your Life’ by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.

Both books focus on a simple point:

Most people do not critically evaluate the relationship between their job and the unique qualities which make them the person they are.

 Even less people try and design a career precisely tailored to those qualities.

***

I have read many so called ‘self-help’ books over the years, but if your basic question is:

‘How do I find the right job?’

Then in my view these two books might be the first and last books you need to read.

In basic terms  ‘Love + Work’ is the theory and  ‘Designing Your Life’ is how to put it into practice.

This first blog post will explain the theory of  ‘Love + Work’.

***

Love + Work

How do most of us look at work?

The basic premise of ‘Love + Work’ is that the entire careers eco-system from school, university through to recruitment and the places of work themselves wildly underestimates the importance of identifying the ‘red threads’ that are the very specific skills, passions and curiosities which are entirely unique to each individual.

Instead, we think of jobs as fixed categories to aspire to, and then to exist within the strictures of the category as successfully as possible:  doctor, lawyer, engineer, salesperson, IT, events, marketing etc. etc.

However, the problem with this model is that it starts by asking the wrong question.

What existing job might I be competent at?

Instead, we should be asking:

If I was designing a job from scratch, based on the things I love, what would that look like?    

Buckingham argues that this wrong-headed thinking begins early in life:

 ‘How many years of math did you take? Science? Social studies? What about Spanish or French? And how many years did you spend learning about you? No years, I bet….What about a week? Have you ever spent a week diving into the extraordinary uniqueness of you?’

The obvious risk of this is that we get to the end of life without really properly examining the things we actually really love, we may live a half-life without ever working out if it was actually the right life to live.

As he notes:

‘The idiosyncratic nature of your brain is so complex, so minutely filigreed, and so massively extensive that its uniqueness dwarfs anything you might have in common with someone of your same gender, race or even your family…there is no one in the world who has the same pattern of one hundred trillion connections as you’.

In other words, it would be a shame if you didn’t do some work to find out what that unique pattern was.

What is the problem with the way most of us look at work?  

Buckingham’s point is that actually if we think carefully enough about it, we all have very distinctive ‘red threads’ in our lives which are entirely peculiar to us, but we neglect to give enough weight to them when considering our work.

The key message of the book can actually be summarised in the ‘Red Thread Questionnaire’, which is tucked away at page 78 in the middle of a chapter, but poses the following questions:

When was the last time…

…you lost track of time?

…you instinctively volunteered for something?

…someone had to tear you away from what you were doing?

…you felt completely in control of what you were doing?

…you surprised yourself by how well you did?

…you were singled out for praise?

…you were the only person to notice something?

…you found yourself actively looking forward to work?

…you came up with a new way of doing things?

…you wanted the activity to never end?

Buckingham notes that too often in trying to identify a career we focus on what we are good or able at and very little time on the things or experiences that really captivate our attention.

As he puts it: ‘…you are – from school on into the world of work – assessed against a set of models. You are judged not by how intelligently you’ve cultivated your unique loves, but by how closely you’ve matched the models'

The major fallacy this creates, which the vast majority of people fall into when planning their life, is:

‘Your strengths are what you are good at and your weaknesses are what you are bad at.’

If you have a strength but you do not love doing that strength, it is not a strength, it is a weakness.

In other words, if you ignore your true loves or your red threads in your work, in favour of things you might be competent at, over time you will get less good at your job.

Think of it like a bell curve.

Say you have a skill set which makes you good at being a litigator. Perhaps you have good attention to detail and you are very good at constructing an argument, but as a person

i) you don’t like confrontation; and

ii) focusing on precision stifles your creativity

then while your skills will get you up the first half of the bell curve very well (and perhaps quite quickly in the early part of your career), if you don’t love these alleged strengths then it is likely that your performance and growth will tail off.

Compare this to someone who is initially less able than you at constructing an argument and attention to detail, but they

i) love beating an opponent in court; and

ii) digging into all the facts thoroughly

over time that person will do better because the job is more aligned with their loves or ‘red threads’.

If you sincerely love an activity or a subject or a particular process, you will instinctively have the grit and endurance to keep getting better and more immersed in that thing time and time again.

You will, without even thinking it, do the 1% extra each day towards that thing, which others won’t do. And the 1% s compound.

That’s why love in the end becomes the skill.

I can give an obvious personal example of this phenomenon playing out.

When I was at school and university I loved public speaking and presenting to a crowd and sharing ideas with other people. But at the same time a strength of mine was writing essays and academic research.

When I first set out on becoming a barrister I assumed it was necessary to prioritise that strength over my love of public speaking, performance and discussion. So I trained to be a commercial barrister, where the day to day job is generally not giving speeches or speaking to people, it often involves long periods of time engaged in solitary research and writing.

The idea was: back the strength and success will follow.

The problem was that after a while of doing the job (even in a law firm as opposed to a chambers) I realised that my apparent strengths had drifted so far from what I loved, my actual ‘red threads’, that it no longer felt like a strength.

The point: love beats skill over the long term every time.

So, what’s the solution?

It would be easy for a cynic to read a book like ‘Love + Work’ and say: ‘what so the advice is I just need to do a job which I love and then I am likely to be better at it, thanks for the tip!’.

But that’s not Buckingham’s point.

What he is saying is that we need to be far more forensic and self-aware about identifying the precise interests and skills that we individually have and then think carefully about how to draw more of that out in our current job or a new career.  

To put it another way: ‘start paying attention to what you find yourself paying attention to’.

Take a typical lawyer. Perhaps you initially become a commercial solicitor because you like learning about how big companies work and you enjoy the feeling of helping a client when they are in difficulty.   

The problem with that surface level of analysis is it only really scratches the surface of the infinite number of different ways you could do that job. In not being aware of the specifics of what you are truly good at or what really captivates your interest you can end up drifting a long way from your original idea of why you thought you might like the job.

For example, imagine that same lawyer finds commercial law quite interesting, but actually in their life outside work they notice that what they most enjoy doing, and time flies when they are doing it, is organising social events for friends and family. Birthdays, holidays, group activities, sports whatever it is, they are known as the go to person to plan seamless logistics. Even, in work they find themselves volunteering to be head of the work social committee and organising talks from outside speakers.

Drafting a 10 page legal memo fills them with dread, but they use any excuse to take a break and go back and tinker with the timetable and seating plan for the office away day. A call with colleagues on a technical legal point leaves them cold, but the weekly office pastoral catch up is the highlight of their week.

‘Start paying attention to what you find yourself paying attention to’.

In this scenario Buckingham would say imagine if that person gave themselves permission to allow their ‘red threads’ to be at the centre of their career rather than a sideshow. This person shouldn’t just limit themselves into being in the generic category of ‘a lawyer’: ‘love lives in the details’ , your strengths are where you show signs of love.

It’s a short example but you can easily imagine that this person would thrive much more by setting up a legal conferencing company or becoming a head of operations for a legal firm, rather than necessarily aiming to be partner in a technical area of commercial law.

Now clearly it is unrealistic to be enraptured by your work all the time. However, Buckingham notes that studies suggest that people who spend 20% of their day doing activities they love are far less likely to experience burnout.

People should think of a career as a scavenger hunt for love over a long time horizon. The point of a career is to be more and more intentional and deliberate about what you are doing and what you are focusing on over time.

In other words, each week think:

What did I love doing this week?

What thing was I uniquely good at this week (perhaps that others weren’t)?  

How could I fashion my career next week to be more orientated to those things over time?

A final thought that stayed with me from the book:

‘Loves, expressed , are a necessity for us all. Stifle them, deny them, block their flow, and they will destroy you from the inside out. But identify them, honour them, and let them flow into contribution and you will become the biggest and most powerful version of you’.  

‘Love + Work’ is the theory, ‘Designing Your Life’ is the practice. Check back in for Part 2 soon.