Lawless is a book that I’m writing. It’s a semi-autobiographical guide to professional rule-breaking, and as I clean up my drafts, I’m sharing some of it here. The following is an excerpt from the first few pages of the book.

 

There’s two ways to go about getting the job you want. 

You already know the first way, you’ve learned it from your parents or your teachers or the TV shows you’ve watched. It’s the “traditional” path, forged by boomers and followed practically religiously by millennials, it’s the one where hard work, perseverance, and patience turn slowly into success.

You know the drill: Get the highest grades, join the best clubs, get into the best schools, land the perfect gig, impress the right people, and work your way up. 

Classic. Tried-and-true. Battle-tested.

Let’s talk about option 1: ticking all the right boxes, doing all the right stuff, working your way to the top by straight-up grinding.it.out.

For a long time, that’s exactly what I did. 

I got good grades my entire life. I played sports. I joined student government. I won awards. I volunteered. I got a scholarship. I became an NCAA Division 1 Student-Athlete. I made the Honor-Roll every damn semester. I got into law school. I got another scholarship. I got on to Law Review. I got a job as a summer TA (the memo we wrote made it to the Office of the General Counsel of the freaking White House, thankyouverymuch). I got a summer internship during round one of on-campus interviews. Landed a full time job. Passed the bar in not one, but two states. Started working 60 hours a week. Billed 2100 hours in a year (in six-minute increments, of course). Took daily verbal abuse from a partner who decided he hated me because I ‘look like a party girl.’

I worked hard. When it sucked, I stuck it out. 

I did 10 hour days, five or six days a week. Exercised on my lunch breaks. Developed a perpetual cold. Clocked in and out and recorded every six minutes of my professional existence while my anxiety and insomnia got so bad I stopped doing anything that could have actually made me feel better (eating, meeting friends, seeing my therapist), and doubled down on the behaviours that all but guaranteed I’d keep feeling like absolute crap (drinking, withdrawing, dating men who put their rent on credit cards “for the points”).

When bigger law firm life became unbearably toxic (about the same time  Mr. “she looks like a party girl” stopped giving me work), I found another, smaller firm that promised better work-life balance and less billable hours. I accepted their offer, happily exchanging ten grand a year for the promise of a working environment that would feed my motivation, not starve my soul. I funded my fresh start with a tighter monthly budget and fueled it with pure, unadulterated hope.

I didn’t complain when I left the office last (par for the associate attorney course). I didn’t complain when I got last minute work dumped on my desk. I didn’t complain when a partner made inappropriate comments at a welcome party during my first week at the firm, and I didn’t complain when I found out the male associate who was hired at the same time as me (with the same amount of experience) was making more money than I was.

I just kept on grinding. 

Stayed diligent. Stayed determined. Logged in. Logged out. Billed six minutes, then six minutes more.

I stuck it out, and I stuck it out, and I stuck it out while I willed my new situation to look and feel different from the one I’d left behind.

And then, after years of box-ticking and award-winning and doing every single thing I was ever told to do in order to be successful, I was fired. 

More specifically, I was ‘terminated with immediate effect’ for taking a day off (more on that later). 

So now you know how Option 1 worked out for me. Mostly.

In exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars and 20 years of my life, I was able to painstakingly forge a path that led me straight into the corner office of a managing partner who (literally) foamed at the mouth while he fired me for taking a single day off.

But like I said, there’s two ways to go about getting the job you want.

You can box tick, ladder climb, and grind it out. Bill six minutes then six minutes more while you wait patiently for the awards and scholarships and extracurricular activities that you collected over the years to pile up high enough for you to climb to the top. 

Or: You can take everything that you think you know about building the perfect career, the perfect professional existence – hell, the perfect life –  and you can burn it. 

 

You can burn it to the ground.