Failure Is Not What We Think It Is

At various points in my life I have been asked or I have asked myself what my greatest fear is.  My response has almost always been "Failure."  I loathe the idea of it and it keeps me up more than anything else.  The problem with fear is that it tends to be irrational.  For one, my fear of failure kicks in at different times and for different reasons.  Most of the time I do not have a chance to define failure before it scares me.  That seems pretty bizarre to me.  In reality I am sometimes scared of something and I have no idea what that something is.  Is failure the opposite of succeeding?  What about failing due to lack of effort or no effort at all?  I presume that the latter tends to scare us less than the former.  The truth is we probably fail each and every day by letting opportunities pass us by.  The only good part is that we don't even realize our own failures in those cases.  But we manage to etch the memories of our attempts that ended in the opposite of success in our minds for all of eternity.  Some of you are failing yourselves right now as you read this solo blog at your law firm job as your solo dreams sit on ice.  The train will come back around someday, right?  I do hope you are right.

The hard part about failure is that it is little more than perception and that makes it very subjective.  One man's trash is another man's treasure.  Opening up your own law firm and bucking the BigLaw experience may well be failure in the eyes of some lawyers, just as the opposite may hold true from a solo's perspective.  Which one's right and which one's wrong?  That is the kicker.  I believe that only you or I can be that judge of that from our own perspective.  So I guess they are very possibly both right or both wrong depending on the unique facts of each case.  There is nothing like a good lawyerly answer to the age old question, "What should I be when I grow up?"  It depends.

Oh, by the way, if one of your last remaining threads attaching you to a law firm job is the "security" in having a "guaranteed" income, then I suggest you take a look at the post from Law.com titled, "Dechert Gives 13 Associates Layoff Notices."  Check out Rick George's post on his Sololaywer blog on the same story Law.com - Dechert Gives 13 Associates Layoff Notices for his take and a priceless recommendation to recession proof your professional life.