Blue’s Clues was a children’s television program developed in the 1990’s with the cooperation of child psychologists. The show was unique because it sought to incorporate the findings of cognitive psychology research on children into its content and presentation – a goal that produced surprising results.
What the researchers discovered in the course of their work was that children crave repetition, to a surprising degree – it comforts them. How much repetition do they crave? The results were unexpected, to say the least. It turns out most pre-schoolers are happiest watching exactly the same television show five times in a row. And so that’s what the producers of Blue’s Clues did – broadcast the same exact half-hour episode every weekday for five days in a row, every week. The kids loved it.
You might not be surprised by this outcome if you’ve ever sat a pre-schooler on your lap and read him a children’s book. You know what it’s like to finish “Thomas the Tank Engine,” then point to a stack of other books and suggest, “hey, how about we read ‘Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel’?” only to get shouted down: “No, read Thomas again!”
“But I just read it to you…”
“Read. It. Again!”
And so you do. Again and again and again until you’re getting kind of sick of it, until at last, little pre-schooler nephew lies comatose in your lap amid a spreading puddle of drool. Awwwww…how cute.
But why do kids like watching (or hearing) the same damned thing over and over again?
For the same reason junior (and sometimes senior) lawyers often do.
According to the psychological studies arranged for by Blue’s Clues’ producers, children tend to pay more attention to novel information, but interact more with material they have seen before and mastered.
The same can be said of lawyers – probably, the same can be said of everyone.
The point is, you need to spend time with something – paying close attention to it – before you feel comfortable enough to get down and dirty and put your stamp on it. And everyone’s got their own comfort zone with regard to how long is enough time before comfort is achieved.
Lawyers live with this duality – paying attention to new material (there’s an endless supply) until they grow comfortable with it, then interacting with that stuff, and hoping they’ve mastered it sufficiently to achieve competence. You can focus on one subject area and become an obsessive specialist, or learn everything possible about whatever crosses your desk and aspire to more of a generalist practice. Either way, some percentage of lawyers find themselves craving routine, the “same old same old” that makes other jobs look so appealing. (One lawyer memorably recounted to me the twinge of envy he felt at a supermarket watching a checkout person ring up his order with a scanner: “Beep. Beep. Beep,” he marveled. “Sounds like heaven.”)
Non-lawyers assume lawyers “learn law” in law school – then sail through their careers, opining with calm authority. Lawyers know differently. No one “learns law.” The most you can hope for is mastery in a few discrete areas. Even then, there’s faking going on – and waking up in the middle of the night wondering if you screwed up.
I clung to the comforting fallacy, during my time at Sullivan & Cromwell, that partners know everything. In my lazier moments, I indulged the wicked thought: Why does she have to delegate this task to me, with no instructions, when it will probably take me hours and she’s done it a million times and could whip it off in ten minutes?
The reality is, oftentimes, the partner hasn’t done it a million times, and can’t whip it off much faster than you could. Sometimes it’s new to her, too.
That’s one of the tough things about becoming senior in law – people assume you know everything, and some people – mostly juniors – think you can pull rabbits out of hats. I worked with a lawyer who was “elevated” to “non-equity partner” only to find some associates suddenly treating her like the Oracle of Delphi. She didn’t know any more than she had the day before – and the assumption that she did was freaking her out.
Another lawyer, somewhere in the middle zone between junior and senior, mulled over the “Blue’s Clues” problem with me with regard to her job hunt situation:
“I want to do the smart stuff, sit in the room with senior people and do the thinking, not the doing.”
“Sure,” I answered. “You welcome a challenge, and like being the person calling the shots. Maybe you should accept that job at the big firm with the look-see for partner.”
She shook her head.
“The stress from that last biglaw job nearly killed me. I can’t wake up again in the middle of the night questioning my decisions.” She set her face, determined: “I need stability, routine. I want to show up on day one and know what I’m doing, then do it and go home.”
“In that case,” I offered, “the in-house compliance job with the 9 to 5 schedule might be the ticket.”
She pondered.
“Except… I might as well admit it,” she said. “I like the accoutrements of biglaw – the black cars, the free meals, the business class seats on planes. And the money, frankly…and the prestige.”
“I’m sensing ambivalence,” I observed. “Isn’t it possible there are two ‘you’s at play here?”
Of course there were – there are two ‘you’s at play everywhere, in everyone, most of the time. Especially with lawyers.
We all have two modes we function in – the child and the adult, and they’re normally in conflict. That’s because the child wants stability, predictability, safety and comfort (“Read. It. Again!”) The adult, on the other hand, longs for a challenge and a chance to distinguish herself (“How about we read another book?”)
The problem is that you keep switching modes, usually depending on your level of stress. If something is new, and difficult, you’ll be stressed, and stress regresses people – i.e., makes you revert back into child mode, paying close attention to novel material, like those kids watching “Blue’s Clues” the first few times. I’ve heard lawyers describe this mode as “getting smart on this” or “wrapping my head around it.” It amounts to doing the same thing over and over again, until you feel confident.
Later (maybe after doing it five times, like the kids watching Blue’s Clues) you begin to grow impatient, even a little cocky. You slip out of the regression, and back into adult mode. Suddenly you want to do “the smart stuff” again – the heavy lifting, the creative thinking. Now you want to interact with the material, show off your skills.
The big variable is how quickly you catch on – in a sense, how good you are at law – and it’s hard to disentangle that from another issue, which is how much you like law. It’s a chicken and egg problem, since you’re going to like the stuff you’re good at because you’re going to master it easily, and so feel less stress and switch into adult mode quicker and start interacting with it faster in a feedback loop, getting good at the stuff you like and liking the stuff you’re good at.
On the other hand, if (like me) you’re not crazy about doing law, you’ll need more repetition before you master new information and begin to interact with it. You might enjoy the bits you’ve mastered, yet dread learning anything new.
As a junior associate at S&C, I became the master of the closing table. Why? Because organizing a closing table, even for a massive deal with a price tag worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is a relatively straightforward task. There’s a closing list, put together by someone who actually understands what’s going on, and you (operating at a level of sophistication comparable to that of a junior paralegal) spring into action, assembling the weird bits of paper (officer’s certificates and deeds and side agreements and executed whatchamacallits) required to adorn the table so a closing can happen bright and early on whatever morning it is that the damned thing finally closes. Piece of cake.
I loved closing tables because they offered me the comforts of repetition. I was like a not-particularly-gifted pre-schooler, savoring his umpteenth rendition of Thomas the Tank Engine, as I assembled each bit of paper in its folder. I had paid close attention to this material and now I could interact with it! Just don’t, please, under any circumstances, read me some other book. I’d shut down in terror.
I know – I was a terrible associate. My most popular post ever was titled “I Suck at Law” for a reason. But I’m not alone in this profession in having to recognize my limits – or sometimes craving the relief of repetition. I might have been an outlier on a spectrum, but there is a spectrum, and we all fall on it. You might be really good at law, and only need to watch Blue’s Clues once before you’re ready for another episode. Or you might (like me) sit watching it twenty-five times and remain content to continue watching it ad infinitum. We all exist on a spectrum.
A fairly senior lawyer I work with confessed to me recently that she likes capital markets work because “it’s always pretty much the same thing. You cut and paste disclosure language, maybe tweak a few lines relating to some novel issue to keep things interesting, then you organize a heap of familiar documents, and voila! Everyone’s happy and you’ve closed another matter.”
For better or worse, I learned during my time at S&C that there is very little that’s “routine” about the deals (or much of anything else) handled by top biglaw firms – at least beyond assembling closing tables. That’s because you don’t hire one of those expensive places for routine stuff – you do it in-house or assign it to a less prestigious firm. To get comfortable with the level of sophistication at a top biglaw outfit, you have to be damned good at, and damned interested in, law, and if you’re sticking around to make partner, it’s because you love law enough to watch Blue’s Clues episodes as many times as you need (a lot less than most folks) to start interacting with the material in sophisticated ways. That path is not for everybody – in fact, it’s hardly for anybody, and we might as well admit it.
Trying to interact with complicated material when it isn’t your “thing” takes you out of your comfort zone and produces phenomenal quantities of stress. Based on my own experience, and that of lawyers I’ve worked with, I’d say it’s not sustainable in the long run as a life strategy. First, you start to lose sleep, then you start to lose your mind.
One way or another, you have to discover which children’s programming (speaking metaphorically) you like, and how many times in a row you need to watch the same episode before you feel comfortable “interacting with the material.” That comfort zone is where you’re going to turn back into an adult, “do the smart stuff,” and start to shine.
The Blue’s Clues issue isn’t only a problem for lawyers. I had a client years ago who was a thoracic surgeon and dropped out of a prestigious cardiac surgery fellowship after only a few days.
“I couldn’t handle it,” he told me. “Going from well-regarded expert in thoracic surgery to first-year grunt in cardiac? Too much stress. I switched off.”
My dentist confided the same thing to me when I asked him if he ever considered becoming a periodontist, like the other guy in his office: “Oh, God, no…more school? No way.”
Maybe your comfort zone is that in-house compliance job. Maybe it’s a partnership at a white shoe law firm. I knew a lawyer who advertised himself as having a dual specialization in “Ag Law” (the law governing the ownership and running of farms) and “matrimonial law” (divorces.) And that’s how he made his living – helping farmers escape unhappy marriages.
There’s also the possibility that you’re like me, and wind up outside law entirely. Enough books! I want to play on the seesaw!
Keep in mind, too, that even if you pursue one area of law to the pinnacle of expertise, the outside world can disrupt your carefully cultivated stability. I worked with a partner in a specialized area whose business dried up for economic reasons. He was reduced to accepting overflow work from other departments, which was humiliating and made him feel like an associate again, struggling to master new material.
You’ll know where you belong in law (or out of it) if you listen to the little kid inside you. When he’s ready to hear a new book, then great! You can move on. On the other hand, if he’s screaming “Read. It. Again!” you’ve little say in the matter. You might have to read it over a bunch of times, and that might help your kid find his happy place. Or, it’s possible it won’t, because that kid doesn’t actually like this book, and wants to run outside and play on the swing set. Whatever he wants, you’ve got to find it, and make him settle down, because at some level (a level that matters) that little kid is you.
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This piece is part of a series of columns presented by The People’s Therapist in cooperation with AboveTheLaw.com. My thanks to ATL for their help with the creation of this series.
Please check out The People’s Therapist’s legendary best-seller about the sad state of the legal profession: Way Worse Than Being a Dentist: The Lawyer’s Quest for Meaning
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My first book is an unusual (and useful) introduction to the concepts underlying psychotherapy:Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy
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