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After landing his new job, Mr. Lauren was busy. Most law firms that make a “lateral” hire from another firm expect these hires to come with a portfolio of clients — in fact, that’s part of the draw. But in Mr. Lauren’s case, the last thing any new firm wanted was the crowd of white-collar criminals that had got him into trouble. So, in effect, he was hired on spec, and in spite of his previous business connections. “They like me,” he said, “but my contract has a contingency. If I don’t ‘produce’ (that’s a polite term for bringing in business), I’m excluded from partnership until I do.”
So, in addition to settling into his firm and jumping into the middle of several cases, Mr. Lauren was out most nights hustling clients. He joined three Bar Association committees, and led panels on esoteric topics (“Is third-party financing the route to law firm expansion?” “Do alternative fee structures work for long-term litigation?”) He audited a night course on legal marketing (with 65 law students soon to be competitors). He started blogging on a legal website; he managed his reviews on Birdeye; he wrote an article on recent developments in bankruptcy law; he got his name on a chapter in a treatise by helping a partner update it.
Did he sleep? Intermittently, but he was determined that this time he wouldn’t flunk out. In fact, he tried to be so busy that he’d literally have no time to fall back into his old patterns of cowboy lawyering — that is, of thinking up new ways to get his clients out of jams. “I’ll just keep my head down and work,” he said. “I’m following all the rules.”
He also harbored another concern, I think, which he didn’t articulate but which is common among people trying to make a fresh start. He wasn’t sure he could pull it off. He lacked the self-confidence to assume that, all things being equal, he’d be a success in his new endeavor. So, as a consequence, he had to prove himself to himself every day. He had to break his own records for churning out work and turning in billable hours. He drove himself. He became a sort of automaton — always the last guy to leave every night, always checking and rechecking every citation before he submitted a brief. He even got a key to the file-room — the holiest of holies — for after-hours research. He knew people thought he was “a little obsessive,” but he didn’t care. “I’m working for myself at this point,” he said, “not for them.”
In effect, he was able to justify (to himself) a type of single-minded exhaustion. He saw being worn out as a means to a happy ending. He told himself that it wouldn’t last forever (“Eventually, I’ll make partner”), but he didn’t put up any guard-rails or limitations. His commitment was total, unyielding, a sort of scaled-down geodesic dome that sealed him off hermetically from everything else except work. He was, occasionally, afraid that he’d get tired and miss something. But rather than take time to recover, he’d do everything again. He didn’t trust his secretary with the details. “She’s nice,” he said, “but to her it’s just a job.” To Mr. Lauren, it was life or death.
If one were to step back from his behavior during this period, the direction was obvious: In pursuing happiness — which he defined as professional success — he was making himself unhappy. Not exactly miserable, but curiously dysfunctional insofar as he was unable to do anything except work. If the work had given him a real high, as some work does for some people, there might have been a rationale for his total absorption in it. But it didn’t even come close to that. Instead, the work was a means of keeping him from what he feared was a dangerous, renegade self. It was helping him prove, over and over every single day, that he was an effective lawyer whose work was “by the book.” Of course, he loved getting compliments on his work, but they didn’t matter as much as his own self-assessment. He once told me, “I’m never happy unless I’m kicking ass and I hear the other guy scream.” Yikes.
But that wasn’t all. In addition to pursuing his cases (and meticulously documenting each minute interaction with clients), he took on administrative work at the firm. He was on the New Hires Committee and the Billing Practices Committee (hence all those Bar Association talks on law firm finance). It gave him a chance to socialize with the other lawyers but, because it had the feel of socializing, it allowed him to tell himself that he wasn’t cut off from people by spending long hours at the firm. “The guys at the firm are actually great,” he told me, “and I don’t miss my other friends.” He failed to recognize that his conversations with all these great guys were singularly focused on the firm and that he was narrowing his exposure to what other people thought about. He was becoming narrow, to the point where the only stuff that concerned him was directly and exclusively about him.
Finally, in the time that he had to spare, he was still mopping up the fall-out from his screw-up at his previous firm. “It’s amazing,” he told me, “how you think a matter is finally resolved, but it isn’t. Problems hide out in the woodwork, like rats.” I was struck by this imagery and realized that his recent past seemed to him like a horror show that wasn’t done yet. All this work, day and night, was a way of keeping “rats” from coming out and literally eating his lunch. His basic motivation was fear. It had triggered the basic human flight-or-fight response, and he had chosen to fight. In fact, it had taken on the aspect of total war. It’s hard to get someone to moderate such a response when they feel their situation involves life or death. To them, an all-out struggle makes perfect sense, even if they’re harming themselves along the way, or at least cutting themselves off from any sort of happiness while they strive for the long-term happiness that they crave.
So, I had my work cut out for me. What I did know, however, was that Mr. Lauren would not have been in my office if he’d thought that his current exhaustion and obsessiveness was just the way things should be. He knew he needed to slow down, but he didn’t know how. He had so conscripted every facet of his life into furthering his work, that he didn’t see what he could curtail without hurting his chances for success. “You know that saying about pulling one thread out of a web,” he told me. “The whole thing begins to unravel.”
I thought that maybe if we could pull gently, he wouldn’t notice any ill effects, and the difference in his overall wellbeing would compensate for his fear that his life could still fall apart. I asked if he ever got any exercise, and he said no. So, I suggested an hour in the gym three times a week. My thought was that he’d like the idea because he could still spend time thinking about work, if that’s what he wanted, even while he was doing something that relieved the strain of a highly-focused regime of unremitting work. Even when things are hard — like lifting weights — a change of pace and environment can produce positive effects. Just doing something different for a while is a tactical maneuver that, ultimately, keeps you on your game.
There would have been no point telling Mr. Lauren to train for a marathon (too much time, too exhausting on its own), but there was plenty of reason to show him that other activities were not mere distractions and, moreover, could give him a sense of accomplishment. Lifting weights, swimming 50 laps: these energize your body but also encourage a new type of self-esteem. I hoped that he’d feel that he wasn’t letting himself down by getting out of the office for a while and doing something different. It wasn’t, after all, so different, that I thought he might flat-out refuse.
When we are trying to come off self-defeating or even destructive patterns, especially those that consume us, it’s hard to make radical departures. In its way, the gym was like the office even though it wasn’t the office. It was a challenge; it provided a sense of accomplishment; you needed a shower when you were done. I also hoped that it would be a segue into Mr. Lauren’s meeting new people. Most people are rushed in a locker room, but they still find time to talk. Even if Mr. Lauren met only a couple of new people, he’d reacquaint himself with the sheer fun of talking about stuff that wasn’t involved with one’s personal existential crisis. He’d get back into the natural rhythms of one person’s sharing their life with another, however superficially. If he’d forgotten the names of his local sports teams, he’d have to remember them, if only so that he would not feel left out.
Of course, we talked about other activities he might try. Once he finished the legal marketing course, why not sign up for art history, or Greek mythology, or wine appreciation! He could join a book club (though that would mean reading a book), or he could check out the Williams-Sonoma cooking demonstrations. The point was to break up the frenzy and realize that, notwithstanding, he could still survive. If we’ve talked ourselves into destructive patterns, we need to prove to ourselves that we can depart from them. We need empirical evidence that we’re not boxed in.
Toward that end, I also suggested that Mr. Lauren could recover an aspect of himself that had vanished with his joining the new firm. Once upon a time, before the authorities caught up to his old clients, Mr. Lauren saw himself as highly creative — he thought up solutions to problems that nobody else had. It was a real thrill. Now, at the new firm, he wouldn’t dare. But he could still find a place for creativity in his life. He knew so much about getting caught up short; about irony; and flying too close to the sun. He could write stories. They would be cathartic, of course, but they would, necessarily, provide an outlet for his creativity. They would use what he knew and turn it into potentially fascinating stuff — not just about the law, but the perils that we all face. It was worth a shot.
He had options. The goal was (and always is) to achieve wellness through personal growth and understanding. In the time that he had been at his new firm, now almost a year, Mr. Lauren had accomplished a lot. People admired him. They knew he was committed. He didn’t have to turn himself inside out for people to maintain their high opinion of him. His long-term self-interest required that he start acting, right now, in ways that would keep him from collapsing. We forget, sometimes, that correlative to the idea of delayed gratification is the belief that short-term stability is necessary if we’re to reach our long-term objectives.
Mr. Lauren told me that while he cared about his own success — desperately, as it turned out — he didn’t want to let down the people who had given him a second chance and believed in him. This was a laudable sentiment. But I didn’t want him to use it, indeed to fall back on it, as an unassailable excuse for interminable work. “Remember,” I told him, “they have an interest in your staying sane.” In the end, wellness and personal growth require that we put every aspect of our lives into the proper perspective. That includes what other people are likely to think.
No one says that it’s hard to come back from a tough break. But we have to take care of ourselves along the way.
