Searching for my tribe.
First published in June 2020.
Seeking the promised land.
Knowledge is power. As lawyers support personal and business decision makers, your advice transcends knowledge into wisdom. Experience, knowledge and wisdom are assets held by the legal professional. And they are woefully under leveraged.
You use these assets to earn a living, or gain status. To earn a living, experience, knowledge and wisdom are deployed during waking hours with increasing pressure to reduce cost. Status is a zero sum game and is acquired only through taking status from a fellow legal professional.
But wealth? Wealth is turning experience, knowledge and wisdom into assets that make money while you sleep. It is a positive sum game where you can all win. The exponential lawyer understands this and finds opportunities to deliver value for their clients at scale.
Wealth is subjective. You choose what your wealthy life looks like: scale your assets into an eight or nine figure business, or deliver equivalent value in a fraction of the time. Or somewhere in between.
Wealth is freedom. The exponential lawyer escapes the limitations of a traditional legal service provider, and they are free.
A shift in mindset.
Freedom requires a shift in mindset from linear, local thinking to exponential, global thinking. This is no easy feat. We are evolutionarily wired to think about input and output as a 1:1 ratio. For thousands of years, the only way to acquire more food was to spend more time hunting. But leverage is powerful. And there are bigger levers available than ever before.
There are three fundamental types of leverage: (1) labor — employing other humans, (2) capital — a force multiplier for your decision making, and (3) product — the ability to deliver more of something at zero marginal cost of reproduction. The best companies combine all three of these levers. Product (books, media, hardware, software and more) is the newest and most exponential of all — and is a great starting point for you.
The democratization of technologies like computing, networks and artificial intelligence have enabled a society in which humans carry super computers in their pockets, everywhere they go; we are producing millions of GBs of data every single minute, of every single day; and almost 60% of the global population is connected to the internet. With an accelerating rate of change, you can no longer afford to think linearly.
This shift in mindset is not for everyone. There is still space for highly specialized experts to dispense bespoke advice. Those lawyers are using another form of leverage, credibility, to increase their salary or hourly rate. But they are still bound by linear scaling of time. For those who have not yet built credibility or want a more scalable form of leverage, thinking exponentially is for you. And there is no better time than now.
What does your wealthy life look like? Once you decide, the only thing standing in your way is your mindset.
Becoming exponential.
I have a confession. The above is draped in hypocrisy. FoundationLab clients pay for the time I spend shaping their unique ideas, and bringing them to life with our team. Each engagement is mostly bespoke. Not exponential.
But I’m able to write about leverage and exponentiality because I’m on a quest to transcend my own linear thinking. I’m on this journey with you. It’s hard work. I’m constantly searching for inspiration from those building the future, across all industries — but especially legal. And I hope to be inspired by some of you.
As group, we have leverage. Together, we can improve our ability to think exponentially about the legal profession, discover new products and services, and solve real problems.
We’ve already begun. To learn more, you can check us out at exponential.legal, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Join the movement,
Mike
