a number out of thin air, since she had no idea what the going rate was for this kind of service in circles where it was not seen as an adjunct to secretarial work. Still, it’s not a bad rule of thumb to demand three times what somebody offers you. In later years, when she had moved on to the more aggressive mores of the litigation lawyer, she found that the rule of thumb had to be revised upward to a factor of ten or twenty—but what she always said was that, though she might have started out on the conservative side, at least her instincts had always been in the right place.
“Well,” said Joe. “Well, I’ll see what I can do.”
CAREER DEVELOPMENT
Years later, when Lucille was making a million a year as a litigation lawyer, she was sometimes asked to identify the thing that had made the single biggest contribution to her career. A lot of women saw Lucille as a role model, because she had started out the way lots of women start out: She had learned to touch type, she had learned a couple of word processing packages and a spreadsheet, and she had worked in an administrative support capacity for eight years, admittedly at increasingly senior levels, before swanning into Harvard Law School with LSATs in the high 170s and swanning out again into the cutthroat, male-dominated field of litigation. What was her secret?
Lucille didn’t say “That’s my secret” because if you say something like that it’s just an open invitation to all and sundry to pry into your affairs. Besides, there’s no point in unnecessarily alienating people.
What she said was that the thing that was the biggest help was the fact that she had taught herself shorthand in tenth grade, even though everybody told her there was no point because most jobs didn’t require it any more. She had practiced shorthand all through high school, and she had kept it up at work even when it wasn’t needed, and when she went to Harvard Law School she was able to get more out of classes because she wasn’t having to scribble at breakneck speed to get everything down. Then every night she made a point of typing up her shorthand notes and making a print-out, as well as saving the notes on disk, with the result that she consolidated the material covered in the lecture. Then when she had to take exams she had already reviewed the material once, and she had typed notes for all her lectures, and she was able to incorporate new material and cross-references into the material she had on disk. So that shorthand everyone told her was a waste of time enabled her to make the best possible use of her time at Harvard Law School, and that was the thing that had made the single biggest contribution to her career.
This is the kind of thing people want to hear from a role model. They want to hear that the role model got where she is today doing something they themselves might well have done, something that maybe isn’t a million miles from something they’re just naturally doing already. Something everybody undervalues that will one day turn out to surprise them.
They don’t want to hear that the thing that made the single biggest contribution was whipping someone on the bare butt twice a week for two years, in a specially equipped disabled stall in the Ladies.
The way Lucille saw it was, most people are not going to get the opportunity to follow up that little tip even if they have the inclination. And nobody is going to come to any actual harm learning shorthand. Nobody is going to find themselves out of their depth following a set of study techniques. They may not end up a hot shot litigation lawyer, but they’ll improve their grade-point average—that’s a heck of a lot more than you can say for most free advice.
The fact is, though, that there’s a heck of a lot more to life than a grade-point average.
Lucille had always been able to keep a cool head in a crisis. She had always had an attention to detail. Those two assets helped her to achieve top scores when she came to take the LSAT. The thing is, though, that the LSAT does not test for the killer instinct. Like it or not, we have an adversarial legal system, and there are areas of that system where someone without the killer instinct