Climbing Mt. Fuji & The Best Career Advice I Ever Received
How one piece of advice during the darkest era of my professional life changed the course of my career for the better
In October of 2011 I found myself at a crossroads. The aftershocks of the Great Recession still echoed and groaned across the country, collapsing entire industries onto each other like dominoes. While many areas of the labor force were struck, few were shaken to their foundations as the once proud legal profession. Between 2008 and 2009 large law firms laid off an estimated 6% of their total attorney workforce, including many associates with 1 to 3 years of experience. Many of these losses originated as a corporate client response to belt tightening on legal spending as the world wide financial markets wobbled near disaster.
While 2011 was not the worst possible year to graduate from law school (that would have been 2010) it was not far behind. The dearth of jobs lingered past the worst of the layoffs in 2009, with many new graduates caught in a backlog of hiring and forced to compete for entry level positions with the 2008-2009 layoffs who had years of experience to elbow their way to the head of the line. I took the California Bar Exam that July and began the dreaded four month wait until the results came in. During that hellish limbo I watched helplessly as summer slipped away and dark anxiety about my future, or lack there of, crept in with the chilly autumn air. While I had built up many contacts few were looking to hire until I was fully sworn in as an attorney by a certified state bar, and even fewer wanted to hire a legal clerk or lower position for a few months until those results came in.
By early October I fell into full panic mode, trying anything to stay mentally productive as my finances dwindled with little sign of hope on the near horizon. One tactic I used to stay busy was to email every sitting member of a bar association with a listed public e-mail address in Los Angeles, where I spent the wait living with my aunt. The emails were scattershot things, near begging for a lead to a job, as unfocused as myself during that horrid year. Then, by some miracle, one member of the National Hispanic American Bar replied back in late October. Although he did not have time for coffee he did kindly schedule a call to discuss my future in the legal industry. And it was during this call that I was given the best career advice of my entire life.
“Life is not a mountain you need to scale in one great leap, but one you climb a step every day by focusing on the little things while keeping your eye on the summit ahead.”
The attorney was an experienced transactional attorney advising as Of Counsel at a large film studio in LA. Well into his career he had seen and heard it all, even a desperate young law school graduate like me. After a brief introduction I began rambling off my life story, covering my travels and my legal internships at Sony and law clinics on my campus at the University of San Francisco, but above all I communicated my sheer, overwhelming sense of fear that I needed to be hired soon to start my career or I would be left behind at this crucial juncture in my life.
He listened thoughtfully for a long while until I was fully rambled out of things to say. Then, unexpectedly, he asked me a simple question. “Carlos, where do you want to be in twenty years?”
I still remember sitting, dumbstruck, on my phone at the question. Twenty years? At that point in my life I didn’t even know where I wanted to be in a twenty days, much less years.
“Yes,” he continued patiently, “in a perfect world where would you want to be twenty years from now, when you’re nearly at my point in your career?”
I took a much needed deep breath, letting air fill my lungs and oxygen reach my brain. And I then I thought about it. In twenty years I wanted to be running my own company in a specific field. I hoped to be married, have kids, but still maintain the flexibility and financial security I needed to manage that company.
I told the attorney just that, and before even absorbing my answer he then asked, “Okay, then where would you have to be in fifteen years to be there in twenty?”
After some thought I answered that as well, as fifteen become ten, ten became five, five to two, two to one, and finally he asked, “What could you do tomorrow to be there in twenty years?”
As he broke my future goals down year by year, piece by piece, I noticed something odd occurring to my body. The tension which had stiffened it, leaving me a miserable wreck for weeks on end, was slowly loosening. My body relaxed, the permanent knot in my stomach unwound, and my mind began to see the wide world again from on top the small vantage point I had locked it in. While the fears of my future still had tentacles wrapped tightly around me, my perspective on how to face them had shifted.
“Before that you had to make the key decision that you wanted to do it, that you wanted to conquer the mountain, no matter the effort and risk it took.”
“You said you climbed Mt. Fuji , right?” he asked as he wrapped up his backwards game of years. I said I had, one of the most memorable events in a memorable year and half working as an English teacher in Japan before attending law school.
“Did you just leap right from your bed in Tokyo to the top? No. Of course not! You had to climb up the damn thing, which was long hard work. Even before climbing you had to reach the base camp, navigating buses and trains and timetables. Before that you had to prepare, buy the right supplies, get in shape, schedule the day off work, set your alarm clock the night before. And before that you had to make the key decision that you wanted to do it, that you wanted to conquer the mountain, no matter the effort and risk it took.”
“That’s right,” I said, pointing out my trek with my best friend Brendan was especially tricky in that we only shared one mutual day off work and had to travel, scale the mountain, and return to Tokyo in a carefully planned 16 hour trip.
“Life is the same way. It’s not a mountain you need to scale in one great leap, but one you climb a step at a time every day by focusing on the little things while keeping your eye on the summit ahead. You shouldn’t be worrying about getting a job right now when the market is so bad, you should be spending your time building up the little skills you need to get that job whenever that opportunity arrives. All the things you have learned and decisions you have made in your life have led you to this moment. You’re not starting from scratch. Your focus should be on the next small steps upward. ”
I never spoke with that attorney again after that call, though I exchanged a few emails to keep him updated over that winter. Even so his impact to put all the gears in my mind back to work was immeasurable. I no longer felt cast about in the wind, reacting to global economic changes happening around me like lightning bolts striking from the heavens above. I was once again the captain of my own ship, in control of my own destiny. I spent the the remainder of that fall and winter reading up on intellectual property law updates and reviewing basic real world skills, including contract drafting in that field and filing trademarks with the US Patent and Trademark Office.
It was him I thought of though when I got an offer at a small Silicon Valley law firm the next February managing soft IP issues for international clients based on the skills I had sharpened during those long, hard unemployed months. The job was a good entry level position with a great team to continue to hone and grow my skills, and set me up for the next stage in the climb when I shifted to a consultant role earlier this year.
My road up the Mt. Fuji of my career continues, even if the path remains winding, and though I may not continue down the exact summit I set out to that cold October in Los Angeles, the lessons I learned on maintaining short term focus to stay in control of long term perspectives, even in moments when the world feels out of your control, is a lesson well worth keeping in mind and passing on to others.
CRomero@adobecity.co
Copyright 2016
