…let’s start with the last few lines from Part 1. 

 

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

Let’s talk about Option 1.

You can box tick, ladder climb, and grind it out 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.

— — —

Let’s talk about Option 2.

Taking everything you think you know about building the perfect career and burning it to the ground sounds scary at first. It sounds hard. And it is scary. And it is hard. For my money, it’s scarier and harder than the alternative, which is really saying something.

Because building the career you’ve always wanted by straight up grinding it out is tough work. Option 1 isn’t for the faint of heart. Not even close.

But looking back on all that time and energy and effort and faith in the freaking process and deciding to burn it all down?

That’s not just hard. That’s damn-near impossible.

Because when you take a match to all of your accomplishments and everything they’ve led to – your awards and scholarships and grade point averages; perfectly polished interview answers and job offers and partner tracks; well-laid plans, picket fences, retirement accounts and everything else that lived in all of those boxes that you spent your entire life diligently ticking –  

What you’re left with . . . is  everything else.

The boxes you didn’t tick. The things you haven’t accomplished. The awards you haven’t won.

The failures and the imperfections and the missed opportunities and the shortcomings and the u-turns and the professional cul-de-sacs and the decisions you wish you could just take back.

 

But option 2 is still – by far – my preferred path.

Option 2 is a blank slate. It’s a clean sheet. It’s an opportunity for self-reinvention which, in my experience, must be created. It doesn’t just come knocking.

Plus, who said you have to stand on awards or job offers or Juris Doctorates to climb to the top of your career? There’s no law, no rule, no universal dicta that says you can’t stand on a pile of personal failures and professional imperfections to access the stuff you really, really want.

And you can trust me on this. I know all about it.

Because my current professional existence – one that I genuinely love – sits directly on top of all the stuff I burned down. Underneath the business I’ve built is the charred remains of a legal career that stalled before it ever really got started, a law degree that definitely doesn’t come in handy often enough to justify its six figure price tag, and a period of unemployment so long and so challenging that my therapist (bless his heart) suggested we see other people.

– – –

 

The thing is, it’s completely possible to build a professional life and career that you absolutely love without following (almost) any rules at all.

Still, there’s a few truisms that even a professional rule-breaker shouldn’t ignore:

We don’t cheat.

We don’t steal.

We don’t schedule meetings at 5PM on Fridays (we’re masters of our own destiny, not monsters).

But there is one thing that, from time to time, we absolutely must  do –  something that the Option 1 version of ourselves could only dream about – something that has the power to change literally everything about your professional life, in a single instant, if you’re willing to give it a try.

The good news? You’ve definitely already heard about it.

You’ve probably even seen it in action.

It’s called lying.

 

But don’t worry, it’s not what you think.