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Call me Bruce

By Bruce

Call me Bruce X and heed me well. In an earlier incarnation, I used to be just like you – sprinting along the pathway of my strategically chosen career. I wanted to have it all, and I was intent on obtaining it. Oh, blissful ignorance! Little did I know the impending torment that was in store for me. But, wait. My story starts way before this.

As a kid, I always knew I wanted to be a lawyer when I grew up. After all, from a young age I could manipulate the truth to my advantage (usually directing blame to my sisters for some offense I committed). I had an uncanny ability to make statements that were entirely true but conveyed an opposite meaning. So, when mom’s favorite lamp was in shatters on the floor and I was accused of breaking it, I could honestly say, “I never even touched that lamp.” Truer words were never spoken, because it was the football I kicked from the living room that actually touched the lamp. That, my friends, is the essence of being a lawyer – to find ambiguity, and then to exploit it to your own advantage.

I enrolled at the University intent on proceeding to law school as quickly as possible. But when I couldn’t get “Rhetoric and Argumentation 101” as a 1st semester freshmen, I took “Theatre Arts 101” as an alternative. (I thought I might as well get a head start on honing my courtroom theatrics.) Alas, this is where the seeds of occupational discontent were planted. By the time I graduated, I was ambivalent about the lawyer gig and wanted to take a stab at show business.

I ventured into the comedy-club scene in L.A. But two unanticipated, insurmountable obstacles prevented any chance of my success as a stand-up comic. First of all, at a height of only sixty-six inches, people couldn’t really tell that I was standing up. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I wasn’t funny. Consequently, I got out of show business before anyone knew I was in show business.

I was soon enrolled in a prestigious law school, pretending with all of the other soulless automatons that I was going to be a lawyer for “the good of society.” But a short 3-years later I was arguing in Divorce Court that my client should have custody of the yellow bath mat. And when I wasn’t mired in marital dissolution disputes, I was defending a product manufacturer from wrongful death claims, arguing that purchasers knew or should have know that the vegetable chopper would explode when it was plugged into an outlet; thus, they should have anticipated the trajectory of the flying stainless steel blade; so, if they failed to duck, then their decapitation was the result of their own slow reflexes.

I was a good lawyer, a very good lawyer; but I was also a very unfulfilled person. For more than two decades, I tried to find passion in my life from my profession. I even left the mercenary Litigation Department and changed my specialty to Estate Planning and Probate. (Something seemed nobler about helping people plan for death. As a side benefit, the risk of a malpractice lawsuit is less if your client is dead.) Despite shifting my specialty and changing law firms, I was never passionate about being a lawyer. As much as I wanted lawyering to be a motivating force in my life, it was always merely a way to earn a living. Granted, it was a good living from a monetary standpoint, but for me, lawyering didn’t provide me with a life worth living. I grew increasingly depressed when I realized that I was doing something that I didn’t like to do simply for the money. (There is a strong analogy to prostitution, but I prefer not to dwell on the comparison.)

My malaise as an attorney never made me suicidal (although there were times when my wife want to kill me for my whining). But it did make me more introspective than most lawyers. (For many of my brethren and sistern of the bar, they can easily ignore their feelings because they don’t have any. That’s what makes them good lawyers.)

After years of self-examination, and a series of post-lawyer entrepreneurial endeavors, I’ve begun to understand that you don’t need to find your passion from your career, just so long as you find it somewhere. Instead of finding your passion in your work, you might discover that your job allows you the ability to find your passion in other endeavors. For me, I’m passionate about helping people find their passion, whether it arises from their occupation or from non-work related activities. That is the foundation for my company ConversantLife.com (that I’m passionate about but receive no income from – continuing the cycle of earning a living from passionless but worthwhile work).

I’m grateful to BizBox and Slate for the opportunity to blog about the passion/work interconnectivity. Yes, they are connected, even if your passion is not derived from your career. I have come to learn that I could have been an even better lawyer if I had given myself the freedom to let my passion flourish outside my legal profession. Alas, I’ve learned this lesson too late, because my law license has expired and I refuse to take the Bar Exam again. But if my insights can be helpful to you, then I’ll consider my litigation-induced ulcer to be worthwhile.

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