This is not what I set out to do when I began my career. When I was sitting where you are, back in 1989, I would’ve told you that I wanted to be a lawyer. I didn’t really know what lawyers do all day, but I knew they first had to go to law school, and school was familiar to me.
I had been competitively tracked from middle school to high school to college, and by going straight to law school I knew I would be competing at the same kinds of tests I’d been taking ever since I was a kid, but I could tell everyone that I was now doing it for the sake of becoming a professional adult.
I did well enough in law school to be hired by a big New York law firm, but it turned out to be a very strange place. From the outside, everybody wanted to get in; and from the inside, everybody wanted to get out.
When I left the firm, after seven months and three days, my coworkers were surprised. One of them told me that he hadn’t known it was possible to escape from Alcatraz. Now that might sound odd, because all you had to do to escape was walk through the front door and not come back. But people really did find it very hard to leave, because so much of their identity was wrapped up in having won the competitions to get there in the first place.
Just as I was leaving the law firm, I got an interview for a Supreme Court clerkship. This is sort of the top prize you can get as a lawyer. It was the absolute last stage of the competition. But I lost. At the time I was totally devastated. It seemed just like the end of the world.
About a decade later, I ran into an old friend. Someone who had helped me prepare for the Supreme Court interview, whom I hadn’t seen in years. His first words to me were not, you know, “Hi Peter” or “How are you doing?” But rather, “So, aren’t you glad you didn’t get that clerkship?” Because if I hadn’t lost that last competition, we both knew that I never would have left the track laid down since middle school, I wouldn’t have moved to California and co-founded a startup, I wouldn’t have done anything new.
Looking back at my ambition to become a lawyer, it looks less like a plan for the future and more like an alibi for the present. It was a way to explain to anyone who would ask – to my parents, to my peers, and most of all to myself – that there was no need to worry. I was perfectly on track. But it turned out in retrospect that my biggest problem was taking the track without thinking really hard about where it was going.
Yeah, I think it’s definitely true that some lawyers feel trapped in their current career sometimes. Law is a pretty conservative profession and it’s pretty hard to find advice for non-traditional legal jobs. I myself felt this: it was a pretty big career risk to do an internship at FHI the summer after 2L.
(For context, summer after 2L is when most people work at the firm that eventually hires them right after law school. So, I would have had a much harder time finding a BigLaw job if the whole AGI policy thing didn’t work out. The fact that I worked public interest both summers would have been a serious signal to firms that I was more likely than average to leave BigLaw ASAP.)
I think EAs can hedge against this if they invest in maintaining ties to the EA community, avoiding sunk-cost and status quo biases, and careful career planning.
Thanks for this helpful comment!
Curious what you think of Thiel’s experience with law school and BigLaw (a):
Yeah, I think it’s definitely true that some lawyers feel trapped in their current career sometimes. Law is a pretty conservative profession and it’s pretty hard to find advice for non-traditional legal jobs. I myself felt this: it was a pretty big career risk to do an internship at FHI the summer after 2L.
(For context, summer after 2L is when most people work at the firm that eventually hires them right after law school. So, I would have had a much harder time finding a BigLaw job if the whole AGI policy thing didn’t work out. The fact that I worked public interest both summers would have been a serious signal to firms that I was more likely than average to leave BigLaw ASAP.)
I think EAs can hedge against this if they invest in maintaining ties to the EA community, avoiding sunk-cost and status quo biases, and careful career planning.