The other day my wife, Maureen, told me about a friend who was complaining that his busy adult children do not call him very often. Her friend asked Maureen, “Don’t they care about their dad?” To which Maureen replied, “they care… in their spare time.”
Maureen had it exactly right. Busy people tend to focus on the issues in their life that require their immediate attention. They put the things that they can take for granted aside to worry about when they can find the time.
I was a socialist at age twenty. I went to law school because I wanted to help the poor and the oppressed. By the time that I was thirty I was a business lawyer. Stuff like that happens to people.
This morning someone remarked that much of my writing about the legal profession is a tad negative. She said, “you practiced law for a long time; you were good at what you did; you made enough money to retire and travel the world. Surely you must have liked something about being a lawyer, didn’t you?”
“It just doesn’t matter.”
Bill Murray in Meatballs
I am a Boomer who never owned a Beemer. The best that I ever did was a Honda Accord and I had to make my way through a Chevy Citation, Dodge Aries, and a couple of Pontiacs to get that far.
I had a few partners who owned Beemers. They all said that they bought them because they liked how they drove, but we all knew the truth. What they really liked was how they looked in them. Successful and well-off.
Veronica is my Gen Z stepdaughter. She knows a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff and is not shy to educate me on just about everything.
Most recently Veronica taught me the expression ‘Act Your Wage’ and then explained to me what it means.
I know a young doctor who I will call Stephanie, whose approach to her career impresses me quite a bit. She graduated at the top of her class, became a specialist, and had many choices open to her.
In Part One of The View From The End of The Road, Old Murray (“OM”) went back in time to speak to Young Murray (“YM”) about the beginning of his journey in the legal profession and concluded that Young Murray just did not get it.
Now, Old Murray is going to check in to see whether everything got better when Young Murray became a partner. To read part Two, click here:
My partner Gordon used to travel to Florida each winter on vacation with his biggest client.
Gordon would pay for every meal for both families and submit for reimbursement from the firm. When asked by the Managing Partner whether he had any friends who were not clients to vacation with, he answered rhetorically, “what better friend could there be than someone who helps me put bread on the table to feed my family?”
I have heard it said that “an expert is someone from out of town with Power Point.” This expression has some old roots. When I originally heard it, it was “someone from out of town with overhead slides.”
Apparently nowadays you do not even have to travel to become an expert. A young lawyer contacted me recently to ask me my views on the legal profession because he had been told by the Managing Partner of his firm that I was an expert on the profession, a status that I appear to have achieved by ranting on social media.