This rule, like most of the Nine Rules, comes to me from my educational experience. I went to law school without knowing very much about the law generally or even about law school specifically. I went to the school book store and spent a great deal of time worrying about how expensive the text books were. I was young, newly married, and on a tight budget. I didn’t notice that there were all sorts of other books one could buy that claimed they would make law school easier. If I had noticed them and believed the claims about how much better off I would be if I bought them, I probably would have avoided them anyway as a cost-saving measure. I eventually learned that there were a wide variety of study aids.
Law students learn the law by reading court decisions and discussing those decisions in class. First year law students are asked to read and brief several cases for each class session. When the student briefs a case, she picks out the important facts and procedural events, identifies the law that the court applied, and describes the manner in which the court applied that law. By reading and briefing several cases on a particular point of law, the law student begins to understand the intricacies of the rules as well as the manner in which those rules are applied to real circumstances. This is how the student learns to think like a lawyer. It is that ability to critically analyze facts and come to legal conclusions that professors are looking for on law school exams. They also look for clarity of expression.
The law school book store sold a series of books called “Case Notes and Legal Briefs”. There was an edition of this helpful series that corresponded to each of the text books that the store carried. The study aid offered you a brief for each of the cases in your text in the same order that the book presented them. I did not find out about these little gems until I had done all of the work myself for a month or two. By that time, I had gotten pretty good at reading and understanding the cases and writing briefs that would help me when it was my random turn to be subjected to the Socratic method. That is the horrible initiation into the law that law professors love to administer. The law professor calls on a student (not a volunteer) and subjects the poor soul to extensive cross-examination about a particular case. It is thought that the other students get something out of the experience because they have the opportunity to witness a discussion about the legal issues presented. It is thought that the student on the hot seat gets something out of the experience because he gets the chance to perform under extraordinary pressure, just like a real courtroom. The masochistic law professors love to inflict pain. The sympathetic professors reject the Socratic method as too harsh and dispense legal understanding through lectures and other less dramatic means.
I decided that I would not use the “canned” briefs because I was already doing the work and getting through it in an efficient manner. I also started to notice that the students who used the canned briefs were the worst performers when it was their turn on the hot seat. I assumed that there was a logical explanation for this. Perhaps the canned briefs just were not very good. Maybe the people who wrote them did not understand the material any better than I did. I rejected this as being unlikely because anyone who had ever heard of the law before had more background than I did. I thought that perhaps the people who were using the canned briefs were reading only the canned briefs and were avoiding reading the actual cases altogether. In that way they could avoid all that tedious reading and the seemingly endless writing of briefs. This seemed somewhat more plausible since the textbooks belonging to the canned brief users looked much newer than the book of canned briefs. This possibility was certainly true with respect to some of the canned brief users and probably presents enough support for the rule all by itself.
As I advanced through law school and eventually in to the practice of law, however, I learned an important truth about the use of canned briefs. The students who used them did not get the benefit of struggling through difficult material and finding the legal gem hidden in the always difficult material. I also discovered that it is through that process that the student actually does the real learning. Having to work through and eventually understand very difficult material is a great process. It is painful and unattractive at the time but the material that one learns through that process will stay with them forever. That is why we must reject study aids and do the work ourselves.
The lessons I learned in law school on this topic felt like new material to me but, as I reflected on my elementary education, I discovered that the axiom was true there as well. I had a very demanding teacher for fifth grade. Mrs. Hadden assigned a great deal of homework and she challenged us every day by advancing the material as far as she thought we could handle it. One of her major goals that year was to teach us how to outline. She did lots of examples on the board and required us to outline the entirety of our history text. She was a task master. Every (A) had to have a (B) and every (1) had to have a (2). I missed a lot of baseball games staying home and producing outlines. At the time I hated her and her stupid outlines.
By the time I got to high school, I noticed that I was producing outlines from class discussions automatically. In college I used outlines all the time. By the time I got to law school, the outline had become absolutely critical. There was no way that a person could mentally organize all of the material required to write an answer to a law school exam with out having first prepared an outline. Indeed, even the fictional accounts of law school like the movies “The Paper Chase” and “Rounders” focus on the work of study groups preparing outlines. I was no exception. I prepared outlines for every class in law school, some by myself and some with a small study group. I learned a great deal about how the law is organized from this process. That gave me the tools I needed to think like a lawyer. It also gave me a way to study for law school exams that kept me focused on what was important.
I eventually found out that the law school book store also sold outlines. I later looked them over and found them to pretty good work. Although the information might have been useful, I never purchased one of these commercial outlines because by this time I knew that the task of outlining was an extremely valuable study aid in itself. In fact, the outlines I prepared turned out to be sufficiently valuable that, later in law school, I sold copies of several of my outlines for the more difficult classes to younger students who did not have the time to do the work themselves. This may seem like a level to which I should not have sunk believing that everyone should do their own work. Recall, however, that I was young, newly married, and on a budget. I needed the cash. The students that purchased outlines from me or from the bookstore made the fatal error of believing that the wisdom was in the outline. In reality, the wisdom was in the process of producing the outline.
Ultimately, the reason my law school outlines were so useful was because Mrs. Hadden taught me how to produce an outline and the value of the outline once it was produced. That was hard work in fifth grade that I did for myself because I did not know there was an alternative. It has stayed with me for many years and helped me most when I was faced with the same problem more than a decade later in law school. I applied the lessons I had learned in fifth grade and did the outlining work myself. That allowed me to succeed in law school and graduate first in my class. That did not happen because I was smarter than everyone else and it certainly did not happen because I was lucky. I succeeded because I worked hard and did the work myself.
I am sure you are convinced that this rule applies to the academic life quite readily and with some very convincing results. But you are probably wondering how it could apply to life outside the ivy covered walls of academia. In reality, this rule applies to life just as readily as it does to school.
I have worked in large companies for a number of years. The problem I observe most often is the large group mentality that allows or encourages people to rely on others to do the hard work. If enough people do that, giant organizations come to a grinding halt. Innovation comes to a standstill. Profits disappear under the weight of bloated overhead costs. No one engages mentally and, eventually, the organization ceases to exist either in fact or in the minds of the people who work for it. Those who end up continuing to work in such organizations are unhappy and cannot wait until retirement. Unfortunately, by the time they retire, they have lost the ability to think for themselves or do anything that requires an investment of time, effort, or emotion. Those people are doomed to lead unhappy, unfulfilling, lives. I do not want to sign up for that duty and neither do you.
Let’s take the example presented by the very talented writers of “The Sopranos”. In the last season of that very popular series, Tony’s son, Anthony Junior, gets kicked out of college because he is failing most of his courses. He gets a job at Blockbuster but eventually gets fired. Tony cannot believe how someone could be so stupid as to get fired from Blockbuster. It turns out that AJ was stealing the large cardboard depictions of movie characters and selling them. He neglects to tell his parents and, instead, spends most of his time doing nothing useful. Tony sees the light and starts to get tough with the kid, forcing him to take a construction job outdoors in the winter.
As part of his own life adventure, Tony finally realized that he had been too soft on AJ. This was at least in part a reaction to the violent way that Tony’s father treated him. Tony ends up regretting that he had not forced AJ to do the hard work himself earlier. Tony’s realization is an important one for all of us. If we really love our family, especially our children, we will force them to do the hard work for themselves. It will pay benefits for their entire lives as they learn to grow, take on work that fulfills them, and, eventually be happy, productive, independent people.
It is true that hard work is difficult and time consuming. It is equally true, however, that hard work is essential to success and, in turn essential to happiness. Do the work yourself and, more important, force your children and loved ones to do the work themselves.
Rule Two: Do the work yourself. Do not rely on study aides or crutches.
Rule For Life Number Two
Do the work yourself.
