A useful, reassuring guide to midcareer course correcting for attorneys.
Lawyers tired of the rat race should take responsibility for crafting a more fulfilling career, according to this spirited self-help book.
Lefkowitz, an attorney and career coach, aims her advice mainly at other lawyers who feel as if they’re stuck in a rut, endlessly overworked, underpaid, and trapped by law school debt or family obligations. All is not lost, she contends, if readers are willing to shape their careers by “design” rather than by “default.” She lays out 10 principles of successful career change that can help readers assess their circumstances and prospects, collect data to use in making choices, let go of past decisions that aren’t working instead of doubling down on them, get along with colleagues, bring in more revenue that will boost their clout within their firms, shift their mindsets from pessimism and caution to hopefulness and confidence, and gird themselves for the risk and discomfort that come with making major career changes. Lefkowitz illustrates these principles with anecdotes from her coaching practice, wherein she gently coaxes clients past their neurotic roadblocking and toward career breakthroughs in which they demand free time to have a life, refuse thankless administrative work so they can increase billable hours, claim credit due, reach for a partnership, take a pay cut and leave their soulless corporate firm to work at a nonprofit that defends people against the powerful, or jump off the legal hamster wheel altogether to pursue the dream of teaching. Lefkowitz knows this terrain well—“I’ve experienced the pounding heart and sweaty palms at the utterance of two words by a judge, ‘Ms. Lefkowitz?’ ”—and writes about it in vivid, earthy prose. (“ ‘So,’ I asked Marjorie, ‘what exactly makes you feel so loyal to these douchebags?’ ”) Her advice is as straight to the point as a well-written legal brief—“dread, sadness, or crying at the thought of going to work” is a sure sign that a change is needed—and sometimes pithily aphoristic. (“Here’s the thing about people pleasing. It’s never enough….If you can’t say no, you will find yourself buried in a pile of yesses.”) Lawyers in particular will appreciate the author’s lessons, but others will glean important insights as well.
A useful, reassuring guide to midcareer course correcting for attorneys.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63905-130-4
Page Count: 163
Publisher: American Bar Association
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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