I have watched people mistake civility for softness many times, and it is one of the more expensive misreadings a professional can make. Being kind to a colleague, a partner, or opposing counsel does not mean you have surrendered your judgment, your position, or your resolve. It means you have chosen a way of operating that costs you nothing and often buys you a great deal. The professionals who last are not the ones who confuse decency with a lack of spine. They are the ones who have learned that you can be warm in the room and sharp on…
Continue Reading Don’t Accept Kindness as Weakness

I ask a version of the question “what lights you up?” to younger attorneys, friends, and clients all the time. This is not what pays the bills, not what your resume says you’re good at, not what your parents or your professors told you made a respectable career. What actually lights you up. Most people don’t initially have an answer to the question because they’ve spent so many years optimizing for stability, prestige, or the next title that they’ve lost track of the feeling entirely. If you want a shortcut back to the answer, stop asking what you’re supposed to…
Continue Reading What lights you up?

Making the right decision feels like the finish line, but it’s really just the starting gun. I have watched attorneys agonize over which case strategy to pursue, which path to recommend to a client, as if the correctness of the choice itself was the whole job. It isn’t. The decision is only half of it. What happens after you decide, how you execute, how you communicate it, how you own it when it gets hard, is the part that actually determines whether the “right” decision turns out to have been right at all. You can pick the smartest option in…
Continue Reading Make the Decision Right

Dolly Parton passed away yesterday at 80, and by last night my feed was already full of thoughtful quotes her fans refer to as “Dollyisms, repeated so many times they are remembered. That happens with people who spend seven decades telling the truth in a way nobody minds hearing. You don’t get quoted that much by accident. You get quoted that much because you kept saying things that were simple on the surface and heavy underneath, and people kept needing to hear them.

The line of hers I keep coming back to is “Find out who you are and do…
Continue Reading Be Like Dolly: Find Out Who You Are and Do It on Purpose

We tell ourselves a story about limits, and the story is almost never true. It holds you back even when you have talent or are in the right circumstance. This happens because of people’s fears. Fear is clever that way. It rarely announces itself. It shows up disguised as “I’m just being practical” or “now isn’t the right time,” and because it sounds so reasonable, you believe it. You mistake the voice of fear for the voice of good judgment, and then you spend years living inside a boundary that was never actually there.

Nobody will tell you that the…
Continue Reading Fear We Manufacture

A few weeks ago I was standing inside a restaurant by the front door, waiting to be seated with my daughter and extended family in front of me. A man who looked like he might be homeless rode up on a bike, stopped, walked in, and came up quietly behind me. Before I even knew he was there, he put his hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Be the difference you want to see in the world.” I said the only thing that came out, “Exactly,” loud enough that my family heard it too, and for a second nobody quite…
Continue Reading Be the Difference You Want to See in the World

I learned so much from reading. Which sparks ideas. Try it. That’s really the whole thesis, and I could stop right there, but the old ad line deserves better than a one-sentence drive-by. Reading Is Fundamental was a public service campaign decades before anyone worried about attention spans and doom-scrolling, and it turns out the slogan undersold itself. Reading isn’t just fundamental to literacy. It’s fundamental to how professionals think, argue, negotiate, and eventually distinguish themselves from everyone else doing the same job the same way.

Books in particular do something a headline or a hot take cannot. A good…
Continue Reading Reading Is Fundamental, and Nobody Ever Told You Why It Still Matters

People love to talk about reinvention like it’s some kind of magic trick, like you disappear one day and come back as somebody new. That’s not how it works. You don’t need to become somebody else. Instead, get loud about who you already are. There’s a difference, and it took me years to see it. Reinvention means you have to dig past everybody else’s opinion of what you’re supposed to be before you find the version of you that is actually running the show. Learning how to get there isn’t instant. It’s a slow, deliberate education in trusting your own…
Continue Reading Never Normal, Never Sorry

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