Law school is ridiculously easy. When you gett ~OUTT you don't really know shit about the real world of law. Nott a clue.
I learned more about law the first summer I clerked between law school academic years than I had learned in law school at that point.
I had many, many options open to me - stunningly so - and I chose based on only two criteria - which firm had the better mentor that I'd work with and which firm had the most interesting client base. I found the #1 mentor was also coincidently the guy who had, by far, the most interesting clients, so it was an easy choice.
The common adage in my subject area is "you make your bones the first five years" - which means it takes five years of working in this area at the fast pace of a law firm before you can consider yourself competent or 'graduated'. I'd say 85 percent of my knowledge in law came from those five years after law school and maybe 15 percent (if that) from the three years of law school. My buddy is a traumatologist orthopedic surgeon, and he says medicine is pretty similar. He didn't feel competent until after his five years of residency and a one year fellowship. Even then, he sought advice and counsel from his more experienced colleagues to provide a sanity check on his treatment plans (orthopedic trauma cases often require the surgeon to plan 4-10 operations that may take place over 2-5 years before the injury(ies) is/are fully healed - there has to be a stepwise strategy before you make the first cut on the first operation or you can box yourself into a corner and then the injury can never be fixed properly).
Again, the value of real world practical education versus 'academic' education is exemplified.
By the way, my ortho surgeon buddy is also from dirt. He's an adopted kid raised on a farm by a dad who was also an ex-Marine from WW2 (who was on Iwo Jima). He also lives frugally and modestly. Last time I saw him he had an old Honda Accord and a Toyota Tacoma pickup truck in his garage, and a Case tractor in his barn. He bought two parcels of farmland and built his house, a barn, and a machine shed. His hobby is raising 'boutique' grass-fed, no antibiotics or steroids beef cattle that a joint friend of ours butchers and retails to select restaurants throughout the Midwest. When he puts down the scalpel, drill, powered screwdriver for the day and rounds on his patients and Czechs in with his residents and leaves for the day, he gets home, puts on the overalls and fires up the tractor, and goes ~OUTT in the fields to move the movable fence so the cattle have fresh grass to graze on. Then after dinner he dictates note and answers pages and calls from the hospital - and makes orders over the phone and computer. Quite an active life he leads. His wife and my wife also come from dirt. We are quite the foursome when we get together.
One time, long ago, when I was visiting my friend when he was doing a fellowship in Indianapolis, he and I came ~OUTT of a restaurant and a top end Mercedes drive up and the driver getts ~OUTT and throws his keys to me and says "I'll be about an hour and a half." - he thought we were the parking valets! We are pretty unpretentious guys and nott on anyone's best dressed list, so we understood his error. Unfortunately we told him we weren't the valets before we considered the opportunity to take his car for a 90 minute joyride.
Always blue collar guys. You can't wash that ~OUTT of us nor could we - even if we tried. Always feel uncomfortable at a Four Seasons or Fairmont, prefer the Holiday Inn Express or even the Best Western. Don't mind the Super 8, although Motel 6 is now too sketchy unless it's in a place like Kalispell, Columbia Falls, Whitehead, Buffalo, or Sheridan.
If alone, I almost always will prefer Dinahs in Culver City or the Suburban Diner in Paramus over Cut or 17 Summer, even though I'm nott paying for the meal myself. Same with hotels - I usually only stay at the top end places when traveling with colleagues or clients who are staying there. Given the choice alone, I feel more comfortable at a Holiday Inn or HI Express.
Old-money rich people have too many rules, expectations, judgments, and stupid games for me to deal with unless I'm being paid to do that. I don't like being around them unless I have to.
Maybe my uncle, best friend, and I all suffer from deep-seated fears of being unworthy dirt people. I don't think so. I think the rich folks just have been insulated all their lives have a very poor grasp of reality and what is important. I think they have the deep-seated fear that they are unworthy of their wealth and use status and material goods to either self-validate or to maintain the facade that they think keeps the world from discovering their unworthiness/inferiority.
Butt what he hell could I possibly know. I never took a psychology course. :)
AI
