Good at what ails you

My firm has a rotation system for first year associates, and today, although I'm still more than 2 weeks away from exiting my current practice group, I had an exit interview with the partner of the group.

A number of people in the group had told me that The Big Guy liked my work, but still, I was mildly surprised to hear him say, "I have nothing bad to tell you. I have no criticisms." He went on to say that he had thrown me to the wolves with that deal in December, and that I had done very well. That I was a quick study, and very smart. That I was pleasant to work with. That my enthusiasm and passion for the work was "endearing." (By that, he was referring to my excitement over visiting a power plant last month, after which he said it was like watching a kindergartener on a field trip.) And that I would be welcome back to the practice group after the rotations.

I told my career shrink back at Crimson once, "Why did the law school even accept me? I'm totally not lawyer material! Shouldn't they have known?" He said, quite reasonably, "hk, like most people at Crimson, you're very good at showing people what they want to see. It's not the law school's job to sort you out, when you've shown them an excellent candidate. It's your job to sort yourself out of the pile."

There are things I like about this job. Thanks to the down market, hours haven't been long, most of the time, and when they are long, like this week, I'm grateful, because it beats surfing the web for 9 hours a day. My colleagues are nicer and more interesting than I thought they would be. I discovered that the average billables at my firm are about 200 hours less per year than the other firms I was considering. Contact with clients and other counsel can be surprisingly rewarding. And figuring things out, learning things that help me understand the front page of the Times, is satisfying.

But it's still deeply weird to me that my Type A compulsion to work hard at whatever I'm doing can be translated by others as "passion" for the work. Really? There's a deep satisfaction in doing a job well. In this job, it's particularly satisfying because good work is recognized and praised. But being inspired by a sense of purpose and duty is a far cry from passion.

Well. I suspect, in two years, all will come out. I started law school with a bang, getting an A-minus in almost every class my first semester. I think being older and being used to responsibility for myself gave me an edge my 1L year. But as time wore on, the people who really enjoyed the law, had a true aptitude for it matched by their interest, got used to the demanding format of law school classes and did much better than I did. It might be the same here. I am not interested in corporate law, in the business of finessing and documenting the movement of money from one place to another. I have done well so far because I brought focus and work experience with me to Day 1. But you watch. It will all out, in the end.
(170/730)