Law school has a way of making everything feel like a huge deal. Every success is a signifier that you are truly exceptional. Every failure means you have lost out on the biggest opportunity for your career and that you are a failure. It feels like everything matters so much in the moment. But, with even a little bit of reflection, most good things are just reasonably good, and not indicative of any sort of superiority, and most bad things are just temporary hurdles that you can recover from in time. Even the seemingly biggest things, like missing out on a big job opportunity, are never the end of the world. There are always other chances. But it never feels like that in the moment.
I don’t mean to imply that in the practice of law, the importance of things is always inflated. I am not (yet) a lawyer, so I really cannot say if that is true or not. In theory, depending on the kind of work a lawyer does, treating every case as though it is of the utmost importance is probably smart- it keeps one’s focus on their client’s interests and on resolute advocacy. But in order to do that, you have to be able to take the losses. Sometimes, no matter what, all of your best efforts do not pay off in a win. And I don’t think law school actively teaches you the strategies to deal with those losses. Instead, it makes you succumb to your own ego.
The most tangible successes are the ones where you beat someone else out. It’s the prestigious job with the high salary that you got over the hundreds of other candidates, the A+ grade that indicates you are better than everyone else in your class, the impressed look that people get when you tell them you are in law school. The successes are all rooted in feelings of superiority. And likewise, the failures all hit so hard because they make you feel so dang inferior to everyone else, despite that not being the case. When you get a low grade, it’s not just an indication that you didn’t meet the requirements of an assignment, but a signal that all of your peers did better than you. When you don’t get a job, its not just the feeling of a single loss, but of being not good enough and not being wanted. That rejection makes you feel like changing every part of you in order to be good enough, even when that’s the last thing you should do.
I feel like law school has not been good for me in this way, because it does encourage, at least to some degree, comparison and competition. I struggle with these things under the best of circumstances, so they have been dialed up to an unhealthy level in the past few months. I reached a point recently where I realized that I couldn’t say a single thing of value that I have, simply because there is always someone doing it better. I can’t say I am a good writer, because my peers get better grades than me and write brilliant papers that completely outshine mine. I can’t say that I am caring or compassionate, because I am not passionate about and dedicated to important causes in the same way as others who start organizations and are driving change. I can’t say that I am personable because I am not someone that people turn to for fun or for conversation. I can’t say that I am hard working because there are people who put in longer hours and do bigger projects than I do.
I lost the ability to see the things that used to make me feel good about myself. And those things are still in there, along with new things I've gained in the past year and a half. But because my entire focus was on being as successful (or more successful) than others in these external, measurable ways, whenever it wasn't my time to succeed in those ways, I was completely crushed. Any good quality I had was suddenly worthless in my mind. And that is a terrible way to feel. I was (and am still) learning, improving, and gaining certain skills, they just weren't being called to the forefront the way the externally validating things were.
High grades, good jobs, and special opportunities are absolutely still huge successes and are worth celebrating. But there are some legitimate indicia of success that don’t rely on wins and losses. When you can demonstrate learning, compassion, or progress, that shows that you have gained something, and no one needs to have lost. These things are much harder to quantify. Entire fields of education theory exist because there is so much disagreement about what it means to learn and to demonstrate having learned something. What “progress” means to each individual person is so different because we all start from different places. And attaching an award to showing empathy and compassion goes against the whole purpose of showing empathy and compassion in the first place.
You can’t quantify internal growth the way you can quantify “winning” in the competitive world. These valuable changes are gradual, rather than monumental. They are hidden, rather than out in the open. Everyone experiences them differently, so there is no room for standardization. But despite not being where the focus goes, they are the things that matter in the end. How good of a lawyer you are does not depend on which law firm you work at or which big cases you work on, but how much you understand about the law and about your clients. It’s all in the internal. Sometimes the external accurately reflects that, sometimes it doesn’t.
If you’re a person who thrives in a competitive environment, maybe this whole idea seems silly and useless. Maybe you are thinking that I just need to do better and then I wouldn’t feel so horrible. And if that’s what you’re thinking, then that’s fine. But we clearly are not the same type of people. For someone like me, finding ways to care about internal growth over external is the only way I’ll be able to make it out of law school without feeling worse. Making that shift is incredibly difficult. I certainly don't have the answer of how to do it. But I think it is worth trying.
It’s fine to say that we should each have our own metric for success. But for those of us who come into law school blind as to what the experience is like (which is most of us), I don’t think it is fair to assume that we can do that, especially when the external factors for success are the focus from day one (for real- people were talking about where they wanted to do their articling on the first day of law school). While we can each start rethinking what we care about on an individual level, I think there also needs to be an institutional shift. As a school and as an industry, I think we would all benefit from finding ways to acknowledge internal personal growth. Maybe it is through adding more reflective practice into law school classes or making space to discuss improvements, rather than just achievements. I am sure there are many other ways too. I think it is important that we find ways to still be able to celebrate those big, external wins without it feeling so detrimental when the losses come.
Thank you for reading.
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Current Soundtrack: Sometimes I try to pick a song that fits exactly with the tone of the post. This is not one of those times.
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