Success

What comes to your mind when you hear the word "success"? "Success" is a concept that has given me some cognitive dissonance over the years, because I didn't really think much of "success" as such until I went to law school and the word was everywhere. And I resented that to some degree, because the message that we students got (and to varying degrees perpetuated) was this: "Success" means some combination of the following and the more the better: achieving a certain GPA or class rank; getting a clerkship; getting a highly-paid associate position in a large firm; and eventually becoming a partner in that firm, obtaining a high-profile government or corporate position, or becoming a judge or law professor. Although some allowance was generally made for the fact that not everyone shared those goals, acknowledgments that those paths aren't for everyone usually seemed to me to carry with them a hint of disdain.

It's relatively easy to think of success in terms of what one might call "public" career achievements (i.e. visible accomplishments in a particular field). But those kinds of events are not sufficient, nor in every case necessary, to what I would call success "in the broad sense" — a life well lived. It is one thing to be successful at something and quite another to be and feel successful in more general terms. One can be very successful in the deployment of one set of skills and yet relatively unsuccessful in the broader sense and unhappy in life.

Maybe the reason that notion of success is not given much airtime by career services offices in law schools and elsewhere is that it is simply outside the scope of their advising capabilities. They can provide some guidance on how one might think about career decisions in the broader context of one's life, but their expertise relates to job placement much more than to career counseling. So they talk about what they can help with and refer everyone with bigger-picture questions and concerns to books. Just a hypothesis.