Now that you’ve decided that you’re going to start a law firm, I want to talk to you about the dip. And this is what I call the stick to it or don’t start at all rule. I was very influenced by Seth Godin’s book, The Dip before I started my law firm. And in it, he makes the point that there are certain things in life. I like to think about snowboarding as an analogy where it makes sense to either push your way through the struggle that’s necessary to get good at it or you shouldn’t try it all. I personally am a skier. I’m actually going skiing this week and I’m only going to have three and a half days on the mountain. And what I’m not going to do is spend any of that time snowboarding because I know that the costs associated with getting good at snowboarding require me to push so hard and for so long, it’s not something that I’m interested in trying to do.

I’m not going to spend three and a half days on my butt only to not learn how to snowboard. This is a dip that I’m not going to go into because I’m not interested in struggling my way through the other side of it. And I think that that is an important thing for people to think about before they’re going to launch a law firm. If you are without other options and you’re going to start your own firm, that’s a different conversation. But if you were as I was a gainfully employed partner at a large law firm with no particular need to leave that job, one of the things that I really thought about and I would encourage everyone to think about is, are you willing to do what is necessary? Are you willing to push through what Seth Godin calls the dip, that difficult challenge that you are inevitably going to face that is going to be comprised of a bunch of small challenges that’ll pile up over years to a large challenge?

Are you willing to push through the dip in order to get to the other side, to have some level of success, to make it feel like this is a good decision for you? And I would say that you need to be prepared as you start your law firm if you’re weighing other options. If this is something that you don’t have to do, but you’re thinking that you want to do, you’ve got to make sure that you see the challenge ahead. You need to stick to the idea of pushing through the challenges or don’t start at all. The worst thing would be if you decided that you wanted to try to snowboard and you didn’t like it and you went back to skiing. And of course, that’s an analogy for giving it the old college try, running your own law firm for a year or two and then deciding that you want to go back and do something else.

Personally, this is something that I’m so excited by. I have so enjoyed the challenge of being an entrepreneur and running a business that I couldn’t conceive of going back to simply doing legal work. I wouldn’t be able to get the same kind of charge out of a court appearance now that I’m 50 when I was doing the exact same thing when I was 25. So for me, there’s a lot of reasons why no matter what the challenge was that came my way, I was committed to pushing through that dip. I was going to put the skis aside and I was going to learn to snowboard no matter how long I had to spend on my rear end to get good at it. And that’s my advice to you. I urge you to check out Seth Godin’s book, The Dip. It has got a lot of great stuff in it, not just including this concept, but if you are going to attempt this, you’ve got to get prepared.

You’ve got to size up the challenge that lies ahead and you’ve got to stick to it. You’ve got to push through the dip, or I’d encourage you to not start at all.