One of the most important things that I realized as I was considering leaving the large law firm life and starting my own firm, is that nobody was coming to save me if I didn’t take the risk of saving myself. You know, my purpose in recording these videos is to help people like me. You know, people like you understand that you have realistic options for a happier life if you are not loving your job right now, you know, working for somebody else in the law practice world. And as you begin to think about whether there’s more out there for you and your family, people who care for you may try to dissuade you from making a change from a place of caring. You know, I certainly had people say to me, Jeremy, you’ve got four kids. You’ve got a wife, you know, you got to pay for college and weddings and all these things. You’ve got a mortgage. Why would you ever leave behind this great job at a big law firm that you loved? You know, they said it’s too risky. And, you know, for a while, I sort of could understand where they were coming from at the time. It felt like it was a risk worth taking to me. But with the benefit of hindsight, I realized that what I did wasn’t risky at all. You know, what would’ve been risky would’ve been staying on the same path that I was on, you know, two decades into my law practice with two decades to go, you know, going down a path that was not likely to take me to the place that I wanted to get. You know, rather than allow this slow motion, you know, disaster to play out, over the course of the remaining two decades of my law practice, what I decided to do is just take all that risk and compress, compress it down into the span of a year or two. In other words, I took all my risk at once. Now, this may not be exactly the situation that you find yourself in, right? I had a pretty good feeling that I could be gainfully employed pretty quickly in the event that, you know, starting my law firm was a misadventure that I, that I regretted. I, you know, will be the first to admit that I’ve been in the same law practice area for 22 years, and I’ve worked in the same city. And so I do have certain advantages along those lines. I knew that if my law firm failed, I’d be able to, you know, come back to a lot of people I know and, and become gainfully employed before too long. And so, you know, I wasn’t taking this enormous risk that was going to leave me destitute, you know, or be something that I couldn’t reverse. If, if, if I was really going to conceive of the risk that I was taking in the right way. I was just taking all of the risk that would’ve accrued to me over the next two decades, all at once. You know, and the way that I like to think about the risk that I was running for years as I was very happily employed at a wonderful law firm, working with wonderful people, you know, going on this path that was not going to lead me to where I wanted to get. It’s kind of like a young person who invests, you know, their 401k money, all in bonds, right? Less volatility, less risk, but over the span of decades, you know, you’re not going to have an happy ending. You’re going to get killed on inflation over time. And so, you know, this comfortable place, this feeling, you’re not taking risk sometimes, you know, if you play the tape forward to the end of the tape, you realize that you don’t wind up where you know you want to be. And that was the real risk that I was looking at when I was working for other people, is not having the guts to get off the current path that I was on and winding up at a place at the end of my life and career that wasn’t where I wanted to be. And so, you know, I’ve been very influenced by a Roman philosopher, Seneca, the younger, and specifically one of his many writings on the shortness of life, which I keep on my desk. And Seneca makes the argument, and it really resonated with me that most people complain that life is too short to these bitter folk life hurls by like a runaway mirror so fast and furious that it’s impossible to discern its meaning before it’s too late. The problem he argues is not that we have a short life, but that we waste time. And in fact, he argues life is long and there’s enough of it for satisfying personal accomplishments if we use our hours well. But when time is squandered in the pursuit of the wrong things, and I’m paraphrasing Seneca here, when time is spent without a purpose, the finality of the end of your career, the end of your life, fast approaches, and it’s only then at the end when you’re forced to take a hard look at how you spent your time, that you’re able to, you know, evaluate it. You know, like at the end. And Seneca goes on to argue, and I absolutely believe this, that the time we’re given is not brief, but we make it so we do not lack time. But on the contrary, there’s so much of it that we waste an awful lot. So if you, like me, are a lawyer who for whatever reason has a sense that you are not doing exactly what you should be doing, even if you like me, have a wonderful job that you love at a wonderful firm working with other people, but you’ve got that nagging sense that maybe you’re not doing what it is that you should be doing with your life. You know, remember that, you know, you know, there is a way, there is a way to get yourself out of this jail, but you have to release yourself, right? And, and I, I was very influenced by something else that Seneca, the younger wrote, and I’m paraphrasing, but it’s essentially that you can be forgiven for staying put, right? You know, you could be forgiven for, you know, staying with your current job, even though it’s not the right thing for you. It’s your decision. I mean, I could have stayed at the firm I was at for the next two decades until they gave me a gold watch and turned the lights out on me, right? I could be forgiven for making that decision, but Seneca makes the point that nobody was coming to save me from that if it wasn’t what I wanted. If I don’t save myself. And, and to be a little closer to what Seneca said, and I’m still paraphrasing, it’s that everyone can forgive you for your loss of time, right? Meaning that if I decided to just stay at the same job for the next two decades, everybody could forgive me for the loss of my time over the next two decades, but no one will come to help me, right? You have to make a decision to help yourself. So the answer is no. No one’s going to come to save you if you don’t take the risk of saving yourself. But in order for you to conceive of weather, it’s within your ability to make a change, in order to, you know, think about this resistance that tends to, you know, hide our best selves and hold us back. You know, when the people who care for you tried to dissuade you from a place of caring for you, telling you that it’s too risky, I think you have to take a step back and you have to ask yourself, are they right or is your situation more similar to mine? That all I would’ve risked if I was going to save myself? If I was going to make the, the bold move of making a change. You know, what am I risking? Am I risking, you know, at the end of my career, at the end of my life becoming destitute? No, I wasn’t In my circumstances, you know, I was just going on a year or two long experiment that I could have pulled myself back from, had been gainfully employed in the event that it didn’t work out. However, now that I’m four years into my practice and I’ve had the time to make many mistakes and to feel the ups and the downs of, you know, a different kind of law practice and being a business owner, I’m loving it. And that’s not to say that I don’t have many problems with my firm. I certainly do. That’s not to say that I’m not scared every day. It’s not to say that there isn’t risk in what I did, but I was viewing the risk all wrong. And so you have to ask yourself, since no one is coming to save you, if you don’t take the risk of saving yourself, what is that risk exactly? And is it risk that you’re prepared to tolerate taking.