Should This Exhausted Lawyer Quit? | Deep Questions Podcast with Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | All right, so we have another question here speaking of careers. This one is from Jeff.

00:00:05.280 | Jeff says, "Hi Cal, earlier this year, you were talking about how the principles of your book,

00:00:12.080 | 'So Good They Can't Ignore You,' don't really apply to lawyers because the more career capital they

00:00:17.920 | get, the more work they get, which leads to less freedom and less autonomy. My question is,

00:00:25.280 | what should we lawyers in the audience do?" And he goes on to say that he is a six-year associate.

00:00:32.560 | Well, Jeff, what you can do is leave the big law firm job.

00:00:40.160 | And not to be stark about it, but career capital theory is pretty clear.

00:00:46.320 | You build leverage by doing rare and valuable things, but that's only really useful if you

00:00:51.440 | can then apply that leverage to shape your career towards things that resonate and away from things

00:00:57.520 | that don't. Big city law firm jobs where you work your way up the associate ladder, you're a six-year

00:01:02.560 | associate, which means you're about to go up for partnership. And then after partnership, you go

00:01:06.080 | up for equity partnership. And then you work up a ladder of equity partnership until the very

00:01:10.720 | highest you could possibly get is named a partner. And the money goes up with each of those levels.

00:01:17.600 | And the money is good if you're in DC, let's say, big city with one of these big firms.

00:01:24.160 | These numbers really vary, but we're talking about you're starting as a younger associate,

00:01:29.280 | you're already at $300,000 or $400,000 a year. As a junior partner, you're probably talking

00:01:33.520 | six, $700,000. Equity partner, you're going to break at a big firm, like a Skaggan,

00:01:42.160 | you're going to break a Wilmer, you'll break seven figures. And then these more senior equity

00:01:47.600 | partners at a big city, the big firm, one five, one six, something like that. So you make a lot

00:01:52.160 | of money, but it's incredibly time demanding. And it demands more and more of your time.

00:01:57.920 | There's almost nothing you can invest your career capital in other than getting more money

00:02:02.000 | and maybe some influence on what your practice is. You can kind of carve out your own practices,

00:02:06.000 | but you're not going to get more autonomy. The other buckets, the non-craft buckets of the deep

00:02:10.560 | life, you're going to have a really hard time doing much of anything in any of those buckets,

00:02:13.760 | if you're going to work up that ladder. Now, for some, I don't know, they value the money,

00:02:19.440 | they value the prestige. For some, it's this money is going to allow a lifestyle that's good for my,

00:02:24.080 | the rest of my family, and that's my contribution. And that's fine. But if it's not fine for you,

00:02:28.240 | if you feel overwhelmed by work, if it's stressing you out, it's making you anxious,

00:02:32.160 | you feel hemmed in, you feel miserable. And a lot of lawyers do in those situations.

00:02:38.720 | The answer is to leave the big law firm, do something else with your law degree,

00:02:43.040 | and it'll be a lot less money. But so what? I don't know what's the good of the one six,

00:02:50.480 | if you only have six hours a week that you're seeing your family. So I usually am pretty radical

00:02:56.160 | about that. You have to go into a big firm law career with your eyes open. This is what it's

00:03:01.280 | going to be, and it's not going to get better. And so many people stumble into it because it's just,

00:03:05.440 | this is the next step up. This is more prestigious than this. And it's not that there's not value in

00:03:10.000 | doing something competitive. There is. And it's not that it will make you feel better because it

00:03:12.880 | does. And it's not that you don't get pride out of having such a hard elite job. You should. It's

00:03:17.760 | very difficult to give you someone to pay you seven figures for anything, right? That's hard to

00:03:21.680 | do. And there is some pride there. But if it is making you miserable, there's no way, there's no

00:03:26.960 | way to reconfigure your job at a big law firm that's going to get rid of that misery. So I

00:03:30.480 | just like to put that option on the table of the proverbial big city lawyers. Know what you're

00:03:37.280 | getting into. And if that's not working, I can't give you a way out that's going to preserve that

00:03:44.000 | salary, that's going to preserve the house in Chevy Chase and the private school in the second

00:03:47.920 | house on the beach. I can't give you a way out that's going to preserve all of that. It's going

00:03:51.600 | to be a pretty radical lifestyle change, a different type of law, something your own firm,

00:03:56.320 | something that you can control how many clients you take on or off. And that's basically what

00:04:01.200 | you're going to have to do, Jeff. So look, this is probably the time to think about that before

00:04:04.720 | you go up for partnership. I hope I'm not the bearer of bad news, but I just think it's important

00:04:09.440 | to be clear. This is the reality of that job. And let's not pretend like it's not, or like it's

00:04:13.440 | going to be different somehow, different somehow for you. You know, Jesse, I went down. The reason

00:04:20.160 | why I had those salary numbers on hand is for some reason I went down a rabbit hole of lawyer

00:04:25.280 | compensation. Because I know a lot of lawyers who are very stressed out and I was trying to

00:04:30.320 | compare. I was like, well, how much like do I make as a writer versus what they're doing and how much

00:04:34.160 | more flexible is my job? And I went down this rabbit hole and you can like find a lot of these

00:04:37.920 | numbers. It's a big topic of discussion in the DC area. But I never know how people think about

00:04:45.680 | those jobs. Like when you hear those numbers, those salary numbers, did that surprise you as

00:04:49.520 | more than you thought, less than you thought, or about what you would have thought lawyers were

00:04:53.920 | making around here? - About what I thought, I would say. - I find that people who live in the

00:04:59.920 | cities, like, yeah, that's what I'd expect. And people who don't, like, what? You get a million

00:05:05.920 | dollars a year to be a junior equity partner? What is that? - Yeah. It's also a weird perspective

00:05:12.560 | for me. Cause I have a couple, like a few, like really good friends who kill it on the internet.

00:05:16.160 | So then I, you know, when I see those numbers, I mean, I'm nothing like any of that, but I see

00:05:19.440 | those numbers and I'm like, that's nothing, you know? - Here's the hierarchy, the elite job,

00:05:26.560 | the elite job hierarchy in terms of salaries, right? So you have lawyers and like investment

00:05:35.280 | bankers, lawyers at big firms and investment bankers for firms like Goldman, right? So

00:05:40.320 | lawyers, you can, you hit seven figures when you get to the partner level, again, big firm,

00:05:45.920 | big company. If you're at something like Goldman Sachs, when you get to the managing director

00:05:50.240 | level, you're going to hit seven figures plus with bonuses, right? So that's in the elite jobs,

00:05:54.960 | actually, this is going to be at the bottom of our platform. Then the next thing you have above that

00:06:00.960 | is, all right, so then the more elite jobs are, I'm trying to see how I order this. I guess I

00:06:08.160 | would order it next, maybe like venture capitalists. If you had a really big venture capital firm,

00:06:12.400 | where you can get a cut of the returns, now you can jump above that low seven figures and get that

00:06:18.080 | good, healthy mid seven figure type payouts. And then you have this big leap where you get to the

00:06:24.720 | tech sector, like your friends, and then the tech sector, because you can have businesses that are

00:06:30.320 | bought, that's where you start to get eight figure or low nine figure paydays. So now it's okay,

00:06:37.200 | I've started a tech company and I netted 30 million in the sale. So now we're at that eight

00:06:44.560 | figure level. And then the people who lord over it all is the hedge fund managers. Because now

00:06:50.400 | when you're a hedge fund manager, they laugh at everyone else because they can do eight or nine

00:06:58.160 | figure income every single year, because they're getting their carry cost of these really big

00:07:04.240 | hedge funds. And so then they look at the tech people and say, look, you're laughing at the

00:07:08.240 | Goldman guy who makes one five a year because you sold your company for 30 million. But that took

00:07:13.280 | you five years to sell your company for 30 million. And I pull in 150 million a year, every

00:07:17.760 | year for my hedge fund. And then the very top hedge fund people will bring in a billion dollars a year

00:07:23.520 | plus. So there's your hierarchy of like crazy amounts of money that elite jobs. Notice nowhere

00:07:31.040 | in that hierarchy that I say author podcasters, we don't land on that hierarchy, unfortunately.

00:07:39.120 | Professor podcasters don't land on that hierarchy. But that's a whole interesting world,

00:07:44.000 | like the super big money job world. CEOs are in there too. CEOs of big companies land where the

00:07:51.120 | tech people are, seven, eight figure salaries. So- Have you seen the new show on Showtime,

00:07:59.600 | super pumped I read the book. It's about- Is this on Uber?

00:08:03.760 | Yeah. Yeah.

00:08:04.640 | It's about Travis Kalanick. There's a episode two just was released this week. And there's a good

00:08:12.240 | scene in there where the VC brings him to the airfield where there's all the private jets.

00:08:18.480 | And he's like, what do you need to say to me? He goes, are we going somewhere? And then he was like,

00:08:22.560 | so-and-so. And then Travis is pretty brash, pretty confident guy. And he was like,

00:08:28.720 | I started, he had a couple of lines about like Elon Musk and Bezos and stuff, like owning like

00:08:33.520 | 40 of those planes and like, what do you really want to do?

00:08:36.800 | What I really want to do is own all of those planes.

00:08:38.320 | Not go on net jets. Yeah.

00:08:39.760 | Oh my God. Yeah. We're getting there. We have a couple more steps before we're buying the

00:08:46.400 | Deep Questions private plane. So we are- You got to get it before the 200th episode

00:08:52.160 | so we can go to South Africa. To go to that, yeah. For that main

00:08:55.440 | episode. Yeah. So we're almost there. We want to get like a boom arm for our computer monitor

00:08:59.920 | so we can move it. So that's first. I want to get longer cables for our video switcher so that

00:09:07.360 | when we have guests, we can bring the video switcher so you can switch video for us. That's

00:09:11.360 | two. So boom arm for the computer monitor. That's number one. Longer cables for the video switcher.

00:09:17.440 | That's number two. Private jet. That's number three. Number four, I'm thinking we should have

00:09:24.720 | our own coffee maker because we buy a lot of coffee. And so those are the things we're working

00:09:32.320 | on. I think with that sweet workable money and grammarly money, we'll have that private jet

00:09:37.040 | right after we get those longer cables. That's depressing thinking about big money people.

00:09:42.480 | But I got to say, those people must all be incredibly stressed out. That's all stressed

00:09:46.800 | out. I think the sweet spot I still think is genre novelist. So you produce one thing a year,

00:09:54.960 | but you don't have to win book. It doesn't have to be literature because there's too much stress

00:09:57.920 | if you're a literary novelist because you live and die by the reviews. But no, you're writing like

00:10:03.440 | a Jack Reacher book. It doesn't have to be literature. You have your formula, one book a

00:10:08.080 | year. No one expects you to do anything else. Lee Child doesn't have a big social media presence.

00:10:14.640 | He doesn't podcast. You just have to write a book. They don't expect you to do anything else

00:10:17.280 | because people are just used to buying your book. You make a good amount of money. Like Lee Child,

00:10:23.680 | he bought the apartment above their apartment for writing. So he could get there pretty quickly.

00:10:28.320 | But it's not Travis was his name money. He's not flying around in private jets. But they have a

00:10:33.680 | writing house by the beach and very little is expected from them. That's the sweet spot. You

00:10:37.840 | have a lot of money, but not a crazy amount of money. But it's the money to anxiety ratio. I

00:10:42.080 | think that's got to be the, if we put the other way, anxiety to the money ratio. That must be

00:10:45.680 | the lowest anxiety to the money ratio you can find, in my opinion, is successful genre novelist

00:10:51.440 | that produces one novel a year in a successful series. That's the sweet spot. Like it. Yeah.

00:10:57.920 | So I got to start writing. So I'm going to announce my new detective series about a suave

00:11:03.520 | computer scientist who by day solves theorems and by night fights international terrorist rings.

00:11:12.160 | Well, you know, fighting off the women who fall in love with them. And then when you do the audio

00:11:16.720 | version, you need to have some character in there with the voice that you used last week. That was

00:11:20.800 | classic. And that French character. Yeah. That French character will be in there. We got a note

00:11:25.040 | from Tim Ferriss, his chief of staff, who runs all this podcast. And he sent us a note saying

00:11:31.920 | that he really appreciated the accent. Oh, it was great. I was dying. So that character will be in

00:11:36.320 | there. And the character will obviously be me. We'll call him Kevin Newhouse, but it'll clearly

00:11:42.560 | be me, but I'm going to have David Goggins voice him. So he's going to have this really aggressive,

00:11:48.560 | deep, awesome voice. And the audio books are going to have a lot of musical interludes,

00:11:53.600 | like action musical interludes while I fight. And then I'll buy the house next to mine to

00:11:58.720 | be a writing house. And well, there we go. So it's all mapped out.

Should This Exhausted Lawyer Quit? | Deep Questions Podcast with Cal Newport

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