Making The Case Against Your Own Possibilities
Lawyers tend to be exceptionally good at identifying risk, but our expertise can cause us to miss our own opportunities. The same holds for most people. Most of us prefer certainty and security over the unknown.
Run-of-the-mill opportunities, the likes of which we’ve seen before, allow us to categorize risk and confidently accept it. The particularly interesting behavior isn't merely recognizing risk; it's using our powers of persuasion to convince ourselves that an unfamiliar opportunity isn't worth pursuing because of it.
No blame here. Just an observation.
Risk Is Personal
As lawyers, we’ve been trained that the way to deliver value on the job is to be the person in the room who understands risk and details it in a PowerPoint deck. The decision is up to “the business,” as we often say on in-house corporate legal teams.
When evaluating our own professional opportunities, the risks become more personal:
What if I’m not as good at this as I was at that?
What if people see that I’m not good at this?
What if I look silly doing this?
What if I must take a salary cut?
What if this affects my reputation?
Years ago, I moved to Nashville, Tennessee to continue my career as a lawyer while also pursuing my interests as a singer-songwriter. I thought that I needed to be quiet about my creative pursuits fearing that other lawyers would question my commitment and wouldn't take me seriously. I'd spent a decade honing my skills and developing a professional reputation. I met with a General Counsel of a major public company headquartered there whose department needed assistance. When he asked why I was looking for project work instead of a full-time role, I told him the truth. I shared my story. Before I made it down the elevator and into my car in the parking lot, the recruiter called to say I had been offered the work. I had assumed that revealing my creative ambitions might diminish my professional credibility, but I hadn't tested that assumption. I overweighted that risk: my experience and track record had already established my credibility.
The Problem with Logic & What Ifs
The curse of the “what-ifs” might cause us to say, “I don’t know how to make peace with all this risk, so maybe I should just keep choosing that.” Or avoid a decision altogether. People, and companies, must accept some level of risk to operate, innovate, and grow. Staying still is not always the safest choice.
But logic can run us off the road when we cherry-pick what information goes into our risk analysis. A lawyer’s job is not to overemphasize or exaggerate risk by focusing on all the “what-ifs.” Lawyers should assess risk proportionately, considering both probability and consequences, rather than treating every hypothetical risk as equally significant. When giving every risk a disproportionately heavy weight, the only logical answer would be, “no.” This is true in life and business.
The Career Questions We Overlook
When faced with a career-changing decision, these questions help us recognize potential benefits that our risk analysis may overlook:
What more could I learn?
What more could I experience?
What do I truly want?
What might I become?
We can also assess the potential consequences by asking:
What is the worst-case scenario and how likely or unlikely is it?
Could I recover from it, and how long might that take?
All of us have some level of tolerance for risk. The goal isn't to eliminate risk. It's to make sure we don't eliminate possibility along with it.
