The title of this post is taken from an advertisement for Dr. Pepper’s zero sugar soft drink and is a nifty introduction to the topic of entitlement.
One of my minor pet peeves is advertisements that tell me that I “deserve” things. How do people trying to sell me stuff know what I deserve? On the other hand, one of my major pet peeves is people who actually believe that they deserve stuff – especially when they have not worked to earn it.
“According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.” Jerry Seinfeld
Early in my career I spoke to a group of lawyers about opinion letters. I was awful. I read the entire presentation, which was chock full of technical details, and bored the audience to tears. To this day, if I close my eyes, I can still hear them snoring and crying at the same time.
Most of us consider ourselves to be lucky if we have a handful of real friends. Usually these are people who we know from way back. They know who we really are, and they want nothing from us. If we need them, they will be there for us. When we get busy with our careers, we sometimes do not speak to them very frequently, but when we see them again it is like no time has passed.
The other day my wife, Maureen, told me about a friend who was complaining that his busy adult children do not call him very often. Her friend asked Maureen, “Don’t they care about their dad?” To which Maureen replied, “they care… in their spare time.”
Maureen had it exactly right. Busy people tend to focus on the issues in their life that require their immediate attention. They put the things that they can take for granted aside to worry about when they can find the time.
“Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.” Chinese proverb
The Chinese were on to something. We all make the mistake of teaching things to younger generations based on our own experience. Here is some of the bad advice that I gave to my Associates:
Those of you who do not attend partners meetings may not know that a common agenda item is why the associates are not working hard enough.
And those of you who follow the statistics are aware that only 25% of partners in Canadian law firms are female. This means that the problem is primarily defined by men, who identify the mothers of young children as part of the problem. Which indeed they are since they often undertake a disproportionate share of the childcare responsibilities and have less time to bill hours.
Since I retired, I do not speak to law firm partners very often, which is just fine with me. For one thing, I cannot afford to speak to them about professional matters. For another, I have had quite my fill of speaking to partners about topics that they know precious little about, such as how to run a law firm profitably while maintaining a positive and welcoming culture.
I was a super-fantastic lawyer. Really, almost everyone says so. And yet, there were a few clients who did not appreciate what I did for them or what it cost to have me do it. Luckily for me, during most of my career Google Reviews were not much of a thing. And until they were, those few and far between ignorant and unappreciative ingrates who did not like me did not have much of a public forum for spreading their lies.
I was a socialist at age twenty. I went to law school because I wanted to help the poor and the oppressed. By the time that I was thirty I was a business lawyer. Stuff like that happens to people.
This morning someone remarked that much of my writing about the legal profession is a tad negative. She said, “you practiced law for a long time; you were good at what you did; you made enough money to retire and travel the world. Surely you must have liked something about being a lawyer, didn’t you?”