The Creative Lawyer

So very clever!

Check out Jessica's Hagy's site, Indexed, in which she cleverly uses graphs and Venn diagrams to illustrate funny social insights.  My favorite is the "Tax Fraud vs. Online Dating Fraud" graph.

Twenty-five ways of starting a personal board of directors

I sometimes advocate creating a personal board of directors. It's basically a set of people you rely on for advice throughout your life and career. Click here to read my recent guest-post on the subject for the Shifting Careers blog of the New York Times.

A lot of people think this is a good idea, but figure they don't really know that many useful people. Au contraire! You actually know a lot more people than you think, and some of the best members of your potential board might be people whom you regularly contact for other purposes.

To brainstorm who might be good members of your board, answer the following prompts (adapted from my smash-hit bestselling book, The Creative Lawyer), as quickly as you can.

Write the name of someone you know who:
1.    Is incredibly organized
2.    Knows how to have fun
3.    Knows everyone
4.    Can give you encouragement in tough times
5.    Can talk to you straight about your weaknesses
6.    Is unfailingly logical
7.    Is deeply empathetic
8.    Is spiritually advanced
9.    Can handle a crisis
10.    Has known you since childhood
11.    Is politically connected
12.    Is entrepreneurial
13.    Is good at raising kids
14.    Is an expert on money
15.    Is an expert on relationships
16.    Is an expert on health
17.    Is an expert at work/life balance
18.    Is an expert in the type of work you do
19.    In an expert in a type of work you are interested in
20.    Gives good advice about office politics
21.    Gives good advice about professional development
22.    Gives good advice about how to get ahead
23.    Thinks you are great at what you do
24.    Thinks you have great talents other than your present career
25.    Thinks you are a great person

Other potential nominees, and their area of contribution to your life:
1.   
2.   
3.   
4.   
5.   

Review the names you’ve written.  Circle between six and ten names to be on your personal board of directors. 

Adapted from The Creative Lawyer. Copyright 2007 Michael F. Melcher. All rights reserved.

Creative lawyers from Valencia H.S. in the news!

I am a graduate of Valencia High School, a reasonably ordinary high school in Placentia, California. This is the northern part of Orange County, the more diverse and less affluent section that is never seen on shows like "The O.C." Until recently, we had no famous grads. Now we have one and a half.  Michael Chang, the tennis player, attended for a couple of years before getting his G.E.D.  Congresswoman Linda Sanchez is also a graduate. And then there's me!

My sister, Jocelyn, who is also a lawyer, graduated from VHS as well. She lives in Henderson, Nevada which is just outside of Las Vegas and, until recently, was America's fastest growing city. Check out her brilliant letter to the editor of her local paper, in response to a vicious editorial against Hillary Clinton.

Not everyone can write an intelligent, punchy letter to the editor. So if there's a topic that you feel passionate about, go for it.

Lawyers and their iss-shoes

Despite my generally loving and accepting nature, there are a couple of ways in which I discipline my coaching clients:

-- I don't let clients use the phrase "don't get me started..."  To me this phrase (usually preceded by a dramatic sigh) suggests someone who spends a lot of a lot of time living in and talking about their problems rather than moving out of them.  (If I'm speaking with someone in a thinking-about-coaching call and they use that phrase, I gently lead them away from me.  Not a scene I want to get into.) 

-- I don't let clients talk about their "issues," as in the phrase, "Well, my issue with that is . . ." and "One of my issues is . . ."

Why am I such a hard-ass with this phrase?  I think it's because I believe the process of analyzing and listing one's issues encourages a type of preciousness that is not conducive to moving forward in life or to being particularly useful to the world. 

Once someone has defined and catalogued their set of issues, said issues seem to become part of their self-concept. They start drawing a sense of personal distinctiveness from their problems, as opposed to their positive qualities.  I sometimes call this "The Princess and the Pea Syndrome."  You know, you're special because if there is just one pea underneath twenty mattresses you'll wake up black and blue. Since you have royal blood. In other words, the sign of your specialness is that you have unique needs, pains and sensitivities. 

This is just not true. Negative stuff does not make you special. Your talents and hopes make you special.  Your iss-shoes do not. 

Okay, all that notwithstanding, I recently did a fun interview with the American Bar Association e-letter about some common lawyer iss-shoes.  Check out the cool graphic, too.

(Speaking of iss-shoes, I have an issue with nonstandard use of grammar. It really bugs me and I don't hesitate to correct people.  Today I am violating my own policies -- I am aware that in my preceding paragraphs I used "they" as a singular pronoun rather than he or she.  For today only, I'm giving up that battle.) 

Stepping aside for a moment from creative lawyers, let's consider creative doctors . . .

Over the past few years, when I would tell people I was writing a book called The Creative Lawyer, a number of physicians told me, "after that, you should write The Creative Doctor." It's on my list!

A lot of lawyers have written books -- a surprising number when you consider how busy most of them are with their day jobs. I think there are two specific reasons for this: (1) many lawyers have creative urges, either because they had those before they became lawyers, or they experience some kind of frustration that wants expression; and (2) lawyers are usually very competent writers and editors, and in particular able to write on deadline. Writing is really rewriting, and lawyers know this.

 

Doctors write books too. Consider novelist Ethan Canin and memoirist Abraham Verghese. Another is Pauline Chen, a surgeon whose book, Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality, just came out in paperback. The book was published in hardcover some months back and earned rave reviews. I own a copy myself and it's really good. It's rare that a book manages to be informative, well-written, and moving, and this is one of those books. Buy it for yourself, then buy a copy for someone young who is thinking about entering medicine.

A bit of disclosure: a met Pauline when she was a freshman at Harvard. I was a sophomore. Back then she was bright, optimistic and personally well-rounded, and I'm so glad to see all the great things she's doing! Her little sister is really smart, too.

Tapping into my financial mind

When I was 11 years old, I had excellent financial habits. I had my income (from my paper route), went to the bank to deposit money each Saturday, and invested in stocks. I'm not kidding. I owned Zenith and Potomac Electric Power.

My joy each weekend was looking at the Sunday Arizona Republic (our rival paper -- the thin little Scottsdale Daily Progress didn't have a Sunday edition) and checking out the housing ads. My favorites were the ones in a special column called, "Luxury Homes: $50,000 and up" that were invariably in a place called Camelback Mountain. It was a hobby shared by me and my mom, who was getting her Ph.D. at ASU following her divorce. Just some fun, real-estate related family bonding.

What I mean to say is that my financial skills seemed to have peaked in that particular year. But I'm now motivated to get them all back. I was just interviewed by a smart journalist who writes a "Ten Money Questions" column for QueerCents.  Check out the great questions and my very interesting answers!

A review of last year, before you start the next one

I did a guest-post on lawyer-turned-writer Marci Alboher's blog at the New York Times.  I wrote about an exercise that I devised a few years ago when I was in Hawaii and needed just that little bit of career-focused, life-affirming self-coaching that is so helpful in the tropics. Check it out -- it really works.

Apparently there is a big market for thoughtful self-analysis because this post really hit the jackpot. It was one of the top ten articles in the biz section for several days running. 

What's also interesting is the number of ad hominem personal attacks against me in generated in the comments section of the original post A large number of people really seem to resent the possibility of career self-discovery and the general idea of intentionally trying to move your life forward. What's that all about?

Why law students don't become public interest lawyers (it's not what you think)

A longstanding piece of conventional wisdom about lawyers is that law students don't become public interest lawyers because they can't afford to. Law school costs a lot of money, many students take out large loans to finance their education and living expenses, and public interest jobs don't pay much. Ergo students can't do public interest work. This line of reasoning seems logical on its face, but I don't think it's the full story. 

Here's another way of looking at the career choices of lawyers, as well as those made in many other professions: demographics.

I'll start with an interesting statistic about the nonprofit world in general. In the next five years, one-third of the executive directors of nonprofit organization in the U.S. will retire. These are the senior baby boomers -- the people that are more or less the ages of the Clintons and the Bushes. The retirement of this generation means is that in the next few years there will be tons of new opportunities for leaders (finally) to move up in these organizations, and it also means that many of these organizations will end up in crisis, since they have not prepared meaningful succession plans.

What this statistic also implies is that there has been a significant absence of opportunities to enter public interest jobs over the past three decades, because (1) there are limited number of nonprofit professional jobs to begin with, and (2) the ones that do exist have been dominated by members of the  senior demographic bulge. Many of the senior leaders of nonprofit organizations, legal organizations included, entered their careers in the 1970s when they were in their 20s, and have held on to those jobs ever since. In contrast, people entering their careers in the 1980s, 1990s and today have generally faced fewer opportunities in the nonprofit sector, partly because other people got there first.

If debt were the only reason people did not become public interest lawyers, we could expect to see two things: (1) there would be a lot of unfilled openings for these kinds of jobs; and (2) a lot of rich students would become public interest lawyers (since in my experience the desire to do public interest is pretty much evenly distributed). But neither of these is true. Public interest jobs are hotly contested. It's a lot easier to get a job at Cravath than one at the ACLU.

This is one explanation why so many people of my generation have found themselves in the private sector: there are many more opportunities there, not simply opportunities to earn money but opportunities to be engaged.

Certain individuals sometimes lay a kind of moral slant on this phenomenon, like, "oh it's so horrible that we have to work in the private sector rather than doing public interest."  I see this phenomenon as neither good nor bad; it simply is what it is. Each generation faces various challenges and opportunities; it's reasonable to assume that these change over time. The task of any creative person is to make the best out of what is available, rather than bemoaning our fate at not living in an ideal world.

I do think that there is a tremendous amount of creativity in the private sector, and some of the most innovative approaches to helping others have come from private sector energies and organizations. Consider the growth of social entrepreneurship organizations, which essentially are creating new positions for this kind of work where none existed before.

In the next decade or so, opportunities should open up in public interest organizations, as senior baby boomers retire. (As it happens, most of these new opportunities will go to ... surprise! the children of the original senior baby boomers, who will then start their own cycle of demographic dominance.)  But my guess is that most of us who are members of Gen X or who are at the tail end of the original baby boom will spend a large part of our careers working in the private sector. Our challenge is to find ways to make this meaningful for us, and meaningful for the world. 

December is a great time for networking ... just ask all those striking Hollywood writers!

I have parachuted into L.A. for a few days to visit, among others, my friend Henry who was once a lawyer and is now a glamorous TV writer. However, just moments after he inked his new deal with a certain well-known star's production company, the Writers' Guild went on strike. So now he has to work that picket line. 

It does not surprise me at all that, amongst the various striker antics (like Star Trek-themed day) the strike itself is turning out to be a great networking event. Because, basically, when you have a lot of verbal people hanging around for hours at a time every day, they end up getting to know each other a lot better.

One of the hazards of being any kind of entrepreneur (and writers are basically entrepreneurs) is that it's very easy to get isolated. Especially when you have to turn out the next episode of a show that's already jumped the shark, like Desperate Housewives. ("Let's see, we've given Lynette cancer and had a tornado come out of nowhere. Wait, I've got it! We'll send Carlos to Thailand for a botched a sex-change operation!") Networking is one way to counteract this isolation. It helps people keep up on relevant information, forge connections, and brainstorm possibilities, and writers need it as much as anyone else.

You don't have to be a glamorous striking writer spending his days chatting up Valerie Harper (as my friend was doing last week) to be a good networker. Just spend some time accessing some of your weaker ties (people you don't know all that well or whom you used to know but have fallen out of touch with).

There's a misconception that you can't do much job-related networking in December, since people stop working, go off to wherever they came from, and in general spend their days in the swamp of holiday commercialism. But actually, December is a great time for networking. Whoever is left in town isn't really doing all that much work and the upcoming New Year has made people a bit more reflective of where life is taking them. If you manage to get in touch with them, they are probably available for conversation. Since the normal rhythms of professional life are off  it's a good chance to mix things up a little bit. 

Facebook can wait, people. And so can that shelf take-down memorandum. Get off your computer and get out there in the world and connect!

Hillary Clinton, misunderstood INTJ

Hillary Clinton is an introvert.  I'm quite sure about this. My best guess is that, in Myers-Briggs terms, she is an INTJ (details below).  This explains a lot about how the world regards her and why the press seems to find her so problematic.

Let me start backwards. In today's New York Times, a lengthy article about Hillary Clinton's political persona  ends by comparing Hillary and Bill at the eulogy of one of Hillary's best friends, Diane Blair. Hillary gave a great eulogy, but apparently it wasn't tearful enough.  "It was left to Bill Clinton to bring the service to its emotional peak," the article concludes.  "When he spoke of Mrs. Blair, Mr. Clinton wept.  'I felt about her as I have rarely felt about anyone,' he said. His wife, Diane Blair's best friend, held steady in the front row.'" 

Presumably, what writer Mark Leibovich would like us to conclude is: "oooh, yet again Hillary is so cold and emotionally flat.  Oooh, what a strange person she is."

What I concluded was, "yeah, big duh, Mark Leibovich.  Hillary is an introverted thinker, and Bill is an extraverted feeler, and each was behaving in a style appropriate to his or her type."

According to the theory behind the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), each of us uses four different types of mental processes, each of which has two poles:  introversion/extraversion, intuition/sensing, thinking/feeling and perceiving/judging.  We have access to all of these functions, but we tend to prefer one of each pair.  This theory is unprovable, but in my personal and work experience, it is valid.

Introversion/extraversion refer to where people get their energy.  Extraverts get their energy from other people, the external world, and experiences. Introverts get their energy from themselves or their own space. Extraverts are often chatty, social and open; introverts are often quiet, reflective and contained. Introverts open up to their close friends; extraverts open up to everyone. Bill Clinton is clearly an extravert; I think Hillary is an introvert. 

Since 75% of the population is extraverted, extraverts are considered normal. By comparison, introverts are considered a little weird ("why can't you just open up?"). Introverts often have to feign extraversion to succeed in the professional world; their natural style is often not valued. Much of the criticism of Hillary Clinton's authenticity is criticism of her introversion. She's basically criticized for being private and for being careful about her words; and then she's criticized for inauthenticity when she tries to act more extraverted and social. 

The second Myers-Briggs function is intuition vs. sensing. Intuitives look for concepts, the big picture, and possibilities. Sensing types are more interested in facts, details and concrete reality. Hillary has some strong sensing skills but my guess that she, like Bill, is an intuitive abbreviated as "N").

The third Myers-Briggs function is thinking vs. feelings.  Both of these are ways of thinking. Thinkers prefer to make decisions based on impartial, objective principles, whereas feelers prefer to make decisions based on strongly held personal values or the effect on other people.  Thinkers tend to think logically; feelers tend to think associatively. Though Hillary talks a lot about her values, I think that she, like the the vast majority of lawyers and virtually all the men running for president (with the possible exception of John Edwards), is a thinker.  Bill is a feeler.

Around 60% of women are feelers, and around 60% of men are thinkers. This means that both Hillary and Bill are in the minority for their particular gender.  This is where the press gets wigged out. The words commonly used to describe presidential presence are all thinker-ish: strong, clear-headed, tough, questioning, blah blah blah. So the press is constantly evaluating whether she's enough of a thinker to be president.  At the same time, the press seems discomfited that Hillary is not more girly: they also want her to be compassionate, open, nuanced -- apparently she is supposed to cry at eulogies.

The final Myers-Briggs polarity is judging/perceiving.  This refers to attitudes about closure.  People with a preference for judging like to be scheduled, organized, and know where they stand; people with a preference for perceiving are more spontaneous and open-ended. Hillary is a J, Bill is a big P.

Conclusion:  Hillary Clinton:  INTJ.  Bill Clinton:  ENFP.

What's the point? Since Hillary is in the spotlight, more or less 24/7, people assume that everything she does has some core meaning that has implications for her potential presidency or her character.  But sometimes Hillary is just being an introvert, and that's that.