That number should reframe how every professional thinks about a bad day, a lost case, a client who walks, or a deal that falls through. Attorneys in particular tend to carry losses like weight, because the profession trains you to believe that competence means winning, consistently. But the math simply doesn’t support that belief, not even for the best in the world at what they do. You can build a successful career by being spectacular in aggregate while being almost exactly average point by point. The players and professionals who last are not the ones who avoid losing. They are…
Continue Reading Fifty-Four Percent

There is a certain kind of professional who makes the whole thing look easy. The attorney who stands up and delivers the perfect argument without seeming to reach for it. The advisor who reads a complicated situation in seconds and somehow already knows the move. Watching people like this, it is tempting to assume they were simply born with something the rest of us weren’t, which is comforting because it lets you off the hook. It is also wrong.

What actually produces that kind of polish is not some innate gift, it’s repetition. The argument that looked effortless was rehearsed,…
Continue Reading Effortless Is a Myth

Nobody puts “number of good friends” on a balance sheet, but maybe they should. Over a career and a lifetime, the relationships you build and protect turn out to matter most in life. I have seen people reach extraordinary professional heights only to look around and realize they did it largely alone and that the summit wasn’t nearly as satisfying as they imagined it would be. The people who seem genuinely fulfilled, not just accomplished, are almost always surrounded by real friendships built over time, through shared experience, honesty, and a mutual commitment to showing up. These types of friendships…
Continue Reading Friendships Are the Wealth of Life

Think of yourself as the patient. Your chief complaints include the same routine, the same vacations, the same everything. Your symptoms include days that are the same, vacations that are technically different locations but functionally the same trip, year after year, a vague sense that “someday” you’ll do something different, maybe right after this next busy season, and difficulty remembering the last time you thought about anything other than work, errands, and the next thing on the calendar.

This condition is common. It’s also quietly expensive. Not in dollars but in perspective. This sort of routine blindness doesn’t hurt physically,…
Continue Reading Experience Is Everything

Warren Zevon was dying when he sat down with David Letterman for the last time in 2002. He had been diagnosed with terminal cancer just months before. Letterman, visibly moved, asked him if facing death had given him any special wisdom to share. What Zevon said was simple. He said he had always enjoyed himself, but that the enjoyment was more valuable now. He said you are reminded to enjoy every sandwich, every minute of playing with the band, being with the kids, all of it. Not a grand pronouncement. Not a theory of life. Just a reminder to actually…
Continue Reading Enjoy Every Sandwich

AI is not the threat to your career. The threat is the attorney down the street, the consultant across town, or the professional sitting two floors below you who has already figured out how to make AI work for them. That person is not smarter than you. They may or may not have more experience. What they have is a willingness to adapt, and in competitive professions, that willingness is currently worth more than almost anything else on a résumé.

The conversation about AI in professional services has been dominated by fear, but that fear is largely misdirected. The model…
Continue Reading You Won’t Lose Your Job to AI — You’ll Lose It to Someone Who Actually Knows How to Use It

Nobody escapes the curriculum. Life keeps teaching, and it does not care whether you’re ready for the lesson. That is especially true in business, where the stakes are high, the pace is relentless, and the temptation to believe you have figured it out is both understandable and dangerous. The moment you stop staying curious and open, you stop growing. In a competitive environment, standing still is the same as falling behind.

The lessons don’t always arrive in the form you expect or prefer. Sometimes a trusted employee leaves, or a long-standing relationship sours, and you realize in hindsight that the…
Continue Reading Life Is an Insistent and Persistent Teacher