It's good to know the king

On Monday, I had lunch with the partner I worked with in my last rotation, who has since become the head of the New York office of the firm. Being a pleasant but direct kind of fellow, he waited until we got our salads and only then asked, "So, we love you, we want you to come back. But what do you want to do? What do you want to be when you grow up?" He immediately added, "That's an unfair question, I know. I don't even know what I want to be when I grow up."

I told him the truth, which was that I didn't know, that I would like to return to his practice group if I stayed in New York, but that I had an itch to go work in Hong Kong.

He was about to launch into a speech, but stopped himself and politely asked, "Do you want my advice?" I nodded.

"You should do it."

This was not the reaction I expected.

"If you don't do it, you'll always look back and wonder what would have happened," he continued. "And at this point in your career, it's easier to do it. You might meet someone. You might not be able to justify it as much later. You should do it."

"Um, okay. So how do I make it happen?"

He went on to ask a few questions about people I had approached or not approached, and then offered to talk to someone for me and get back to me. "If you wanted to go to Singapore," he said with a smile, "that would have been easy -- the managing partner there owes me a favor."

I must have still been goggle-eyed at this turn of events, so he explained, "That's kind of how things work."

When we returned to the office, I paused before heading downstairs to my floor. "Thank you," I said, with an almost quizzical tilt of my head. "Thank you for lunch."

"You're welcome. I enjoyed it," he returned. "I'll talk to so-and-so for you and get back to you."

I thanked him again and wished him a good day, and went downstairs to my office, marveling at how serendipitously things had turned out. A year ago, I had put down his practice group as a preference, but hadn't known anything about the group. When I discovered that I had been assigned to it as my first rotation, I looked at the group's webpage and was dismayed to discover that I understood nothing on the page. I considered trying to get out of it, but inertia set in (plus the distinct feeling upon a mild probing of HR that it would be futile).

It was chance again that a pro bono project happened to come the partner's way. It was chance again that the deal turned out to be a huge mess, leading to a simultaneously horrible and hilarious December that culminated in me closing the deal being the only associate officially on the deal and in the office, thus cementing a reputation, rightly or wrongly, of being a Very Good Associate. I had lots of help, particularly from a lovely associate now departed from the firm, but since then, it seems, the partner has held me in high regard. And then he became the head of the office.

This is the kind of turn of events that keeps me an optimistic realist. With so many things that could go wrong, it's sort of miraculous that they don't. And in my case, things left to chance seem to often go very, very right.
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