You, who are on the road; must have a code you try to live by; and so become yourself; because the past is just a goodbye; teach your children well.
~ Graham Nash
Parents teach their children about success by reference to how things were during their productive years. To my grandparents, success was a job in the front office at the factory, rather than on the production floor. My parents hoped that their children would become professionals. I wanted my children to achieve some work/life balance.
All of those parents through the generations thought that the key to success was being “smart.”
I was raised with some quaint notions about what it means to be ‘smart.’ It involved things like getting good marks in school and going to university.
By that definition, I was smart.
I was also taught that being smart meant that I would be successful and make lots of money, with those two goals often being conflated. I also naively thought that success and happiness had something to do with each other. Nobody ever mentioned being happy as an independent goal.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that much of this rosy vision is simply not true.
Hanging out with lawyers, I came to realize that there are many highly intelligent, but terribly unhappy, professionals who are considered to be successful.
Meeting successful and wealthy clients made me understand that, while some of them were brilliant, others were not. Dick was one of my clients. Dick was a hick who was thick as a stick. He had only one talent, and that was selling stuff, an activity which netted him millions of dollars a year. He seemed happy. Clueless, but happy.
Meeting Dick and others like him confused me. I was way smarter than them. They were much more ‘successful’ than me. It made no sense to me. My parents never told me that stupid people could be more successful than smart people.
Of course, the key to understanding this most unsatisfactory state of affairs, is to redefine terms like ‘smart’ and ‘success.’
Perhaps the meaning of ‘smart”’should encompass ideas such as creativity, emotional intelligence, empathy, friendliness, and willingness to assume risk.
And maybe ‘success’ should be less about money, and more about happiness, physical fitness, mental health, and maintaining good relationships.
The legal establishment does not tell this to the newcomers to the profession, because it is not in their interests to do so. And as supposedly smart as they are, many of the young folks keep buying into the same old fairy tales.
This article was originally published by Law360 Canada, part of LexisNexis Canada Inc.