Health / Wellness

Achieving Lawyer Nirvana – Here Is How I Do It

It is incredibly easy, according to managing partner Bruce Stachenfeld.

By  
on

lawyer nirvana meditation meditatingHow does one achieve nirvana in one’s job as a lawyer? It is incredibly easy – and at the same time kind of hard for most people – to do this. In a nutshell, it is as follows:

Make your job your hobby.

That is all there is to it.

I guess I could end this article here – but I will go a little further into this and explain what I mean.

There is an old saying that “if you love what you do, you never have to work a day in your life.”

Let me give an example. Have you ever gone to a pizza parlor where the guy is making pizza? It sounds dull to tears, doesn’t it? Making dough, rolling it up, and stuffing it with some sauce into a hot oven. And doing the same thing day after day after day…..

But then you see the guy rolling it around – throwing it in the air – twirling it around – bowing to the audience – with the little kids staring up in awe and cheering and clapping – and you see that this guy is “in a zone.” He is loving every minute of it. And you yourself – a grownup – if you look at your face you are, to your surprise, smiling. Nay, you are grinning. You are loving every minute of it too. Not only how good he is at throwing the pizza up in the air, but how much fun the little kiddies are having watching it. Perhaps this is all because you are being brought back to the fun and innocence of when you were a kid yourself and so easily amused.

Sponsored

All of this – all of it – is because the pizza guy loves his job and is taking something that many of us would look at as a chore, and turning it into something that is fun for him and those around him. He is having a ball. And you know, the more he does it, the more tricks he adds to his repertoire, the cooler it gets, the more positive it is, and the more it feeds on itself. Maybe one of the other guys joins in and gets pizza dough slapped in his face. Maybe it is a comedy routine after a while. Maybe it is even, dare I say, a show. Maybe people line up every day at 5:00 to watch them do their thing.

There is a concept in the Tao called “wu wei,” which is the cultivation of a mental state in which our actions are quite effortlessly in alignment with the flow of life. There are a lot of definitions of this that I have trouble translating, and they include:

  • Effortless doing
  • Action without action
  • The Tao of letting go…..

I am not 100% sure what is the right definition, but for me it is a kind of thrilling feeling that I get when I am doing my job – doing what I do best – and it just feels right – it just flows – it is truly effortless.

I am sure that if you are reading this article, you have experienced the incredible thrill of wu wei. Perhaps intellectually – perhaps in sports – perhaps in something else. It is an utterly awesome feeling.

Sponsored

If you get to this in practicing law, you have achieved lawyer nirvana.

How do you do it? It is pretty easy actually, but it absolutely requires the correct mental state to allow it to happen. You just fall in love with what you do. Remember the first day you took up violin? I’ll bet that was a pretty awful day. But if you decided you wanted to play a beautiful etude more than anything else in the world, then it started out hard – and maybe even terribly awful – but then one day, after years of hard work consisting of breakthroughs and breakdowns, there you are with your violin and the two of you are in love with each other. And you don’t have to even try to play it any more – it is just pure enjoyment – it is wu wei.

You definitely can do this in practicing law. The first step is just to let yourself fall in love with what you do.

Bruce Stachenfeld

Bruce Stachenfeld

Bruce Stachenfeld is the managing partner of Duval & Stachenfeld LLP, an approximately 70-lawyer law firm based in midtown Manhattan. The firm is known as “The Pure Play in Real Estate Law” because all of its practice areas are focused around real estate. With more than 50 full-time real estate lawyers, the firm is one of the largest real estate law practices in New York City. You can contact Bruce by email at [email protected]. Bruce also writes The Real Estate Philosopher™, which contains applications of Bruce’s eclectic, insightful, and outside-the-box thinking to the real estate world. If you would like to read previous articles or subscribe, please click here.

Topics

, , , , , , , , ,