The Creative Lawyer

This just in! It turns out I'm on Youtube

I learned that one of my presentations is on youtube.  It's a Google Tech Talk I did two years ago called "Create the Career You Want: A Non-Hyped Approach for Thoughtful Professionals."  (You will note that I am pre-Lasik.)

It's pretty good, if I do say so myself, especially if you ignore what seem to be rows and rows of empty seats.  There were people actually there!

Here's the link.

Debate camp

Every summer in high school I spent three week at the Golden West Forensics Institute at the University of Redlands, which everyone called “debate camp” or “Redlands.”  As in, “are you going to Redlands this year?” or “I need to fill out my financial aid form for debate camp.” There were three destinations of choice for the ambitious 14-17 year-olds who participated in competitive speech and debate:  Redlands, in Southern California; Northwestern; and Georgetown.

Kids came from all over the U.S. to Redlands.  Every morning we’d have lectures several hours long about the topic in question, usually led by college debaters in their 20s, and in the afternoons we’d have different “labs” – debate lab, extemp lab, oratory lab, etc.  In the evenings, we burrow away in libraries and in dorm rooms, researching evidence, typing quotes on ditto sheets and cutting and pasting selections onto three-by-five index cards.   At lights out, which I recall was around 11:30 pm, we’d cram towels around the doorframe so that our lights would be invisible to hall monitors.  There may have been social experiences sprinkled through by the Redlands administrators.  At the end there was a big tournament.   Some kids slept around four or five hours a night for the duration.  But who needed sleep when a tournament was coming?

Debate camp was awesome!  It was one of the highlights of my high school experience.  Debate camp is where I discovered kids who were really smart and really competitive, and at times multidimensional.  Debate camp is where I discovered Jewish people.  Debate camp is where I learned how to do real research.  Debate camp is where I developed a surprisingly large part of my knowledge about the world, including topics like alternative energy, healthcare reform, global trade, population control, and so forth.  The kind of debate we did was known as “policy debate” and highly research-based.  So at age 15 I could explain how, in developing countries, fertility declines when female literacy rises, or how very poor families have really large families because they assume that many of them will die, so that when you improve health you reduce family size and population growth.  This was all useful for potential debates, but it sure informed me about the world.

There were stars within the debate camp world.  Imagine all of the honor, respect and desirability of being a star athlete, except applied to someone known for his or her intelligence and verbal dexterity.  Going into my sophomore year of high school, one of our Redlands instructors was Sandra Seville-Jones, who had just graduated from high school and was bound for Harvard.  During her senior year, she and her brother – they were an unusual brother-sister team – had won 18 national tournaments, a remarkable feat.   Years later, when I ran into her in front of  Lamont Library at Harvard, I still felt breathless at her star power.

Good times, good times.

The reason debate camp was so powerful and great for me, and why I would recommend anyone put their kid in organized speech and debate, if it’s available, is that it was one of the few activities I participated in growing up that had no upward limit.  How good could a seven-minute speech be with only a 30-minute preparation?  Well, the sky was the limit.  How smart could you be in debate?  Well, potentially as smart as some of the smartest kids you’ve ever seen, if you put in thousands of hours of work. By entering an environment where I competed against others, in the end I just competed against myself, and pushed myself farther than I thought possible.

A very large percentage of kids who participate in speech and debate end up being lawyers, and often they do something in the public or academic sector.  For instance, Evan Caminker (two years ahead of me), who was the first person my partner and I did a practice debate with, is now the Dean at the University of Michigan Law School.  Preeta Bansal (one year behind me), a Nebraskan I met at Redlands, became the youngest-ever solicitor general for the state of New York and is now General Counsel of the OMB. High school ultra-achiever star Sandra Seville-Jones (three years ahead of me) is managing partner of Munger Tolles & Olson in Los Angeles. David Sklansky (one of our instructors), is a professor at Boalt, following a decade at UCLA law school.  (I add parenthetically that he is another liberal who emerged from Orange County -- I'm not the only one!)

I spent thousands of hours in high school working on speech and debate, and never quite knew where it would go.  But I didn’t think much about that because I was so in love with, even obsessed by, the activity.  I went from being an insecure kid with a lisp who spoke way too fast, to someone who could easily address a crowd of a thousand.  I also learned how to construct an essay, use words with impact, and stick to something hard for a really long time.  Which is pretty much what you want an education to do. 

Saying a lot, in few words

A couple of weeks ago I attended a week-long training on team coaching in Mexico City.  Aside from getting altitude sickness for the first couple of days (elevation = 7,700 feet), it was fun, energizing, humbling, filled with learning, and ultimately a Csikszentmihalyi-ish "flow" kind of activity.  (It was all in Spanish, hence the learning + humbling feeling.)

One of my new coach friends is Cecilia Garcia-Robles, who lives in Mexico City and who was part of my small group.  (You can't have a coach training without small-group projects, apparently.)  She studied with New Ventures West and Newfield Network, in case you follow such things.  We have the same Enneagram type -- four.  She used to be a rocker and knows the lyrics to every Beatles song.

I love her blog.  She pairs very simple-but-significant statements and questions with great images. Lacking much visual sense myself, I admire this.  A great way to brush up on your Spanish while contemplating bigger things.  Check it out.

Golden Years

This is Splash, one of our three dogs.  She is a Shetland Sheepdog and, when much younger, did well in the show ring.  But she wasn't really into it and for most of her life has basically been hanging out.  Now she is 15.  Her 16th birthday is next month.

Splash's hearing is mostly gone and it's not clear how great her vision is, but other than that she's super healthy, thanks to good genes, an organic raw diet, an expensive regimen of mysterious naturopathic supplements and the fact that we go to the same vet as Martha Stewart (although we were there first). And maybe most important, the informed ministrations of Jason. Two years ago she had surgery for a large, malignant mammary tumor, and she came through with flying colors. "She's a little truck," the vet said, with some amazement, at her great recovery.  

Splash came to live with us in 2001, after our first dog, Astra, died at a young age of kidney failure. She was just three and a half.  I don't think I've ever really gotten over it. Astra was my best friend and I still miss her.  I named my S-Corp after her, and she is one of the three people I dedicated The Creative Lawyer to.  Splash is Astra's mother, and also the mom of Luna, one of other dogs.  (Our third dog, Jackson, has the same father as Luna, but a different mother.) 

When Splash first came to live with us, I didn't feel all that close to her.  She's laid-back (except around food), and basically pretty lazy.  Or maybe a better way of saying that is that she's pretty chilled out.  She likes to eat, and sleep, and sometimes stand on the couch to bark at people walking by on West 84th St.  But over the years, I have become much closer to her.  She is affectionate, and she really enjoys life, in her own style.

When I was younger, the term "golden years" didn't resonate much with me.  I associated it with the movie, "On Golden Pond," starring Henry and Jane Fonda.  It seemed an unconvincing euphemism for the declining years before you die. 

Now I think I get it.  Because these years with Splash feel golden.  Golden years now means an awareness that time is limited, combined with a deep appreciation for all we've had, and continue to have.  Nowadays, I enjoy every day with Splash.  With a dog, every day provides multiple opportunities for little happinesses.  I have oatmeal, Splash has a little oatmeal.  I make a quesadilla, Splash has a bit of quesadilla.  We wake up together and play together.  I watch TV, she watches TV. 

Of course, there's lots of petting and cooing. 

Interestingly, these golden years parallel a different time of golden years -- when dogs are puppies, and humans are babies and little kids.  In these times, it's a lot easier to take live day by day, and moment by moment, and experience how beautiful a thing it can be.