Fuel the Spark: 5 Guiding Values for Success in Law School & Beyond - Softcover

Houchin, Kevin E

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1600375464 ISBN 13: 9781600375460

Publisher: Morgan James Publishing, 2009

Synopsis

Fuel the Spark: 5 Guiding Values for Success in Law School & Beyond was written to give law students, and students of life, a context within which to filter the decisions that will shape our lives, our families, our communities, our country, and our world. What responsibilities do you accept as your own? What situations will you accept as they exist? When will you show up? Where will you put your attention? How will you stay engaged? How will you give back? All these questions and more are explored. Leadership strategies for people who want to use their legal educations to make a positive difference in our world.

While the book is written specifically for law students, it is easily applied to the situations faced by every leader, in almost every situation requiring focused attention and engagement in a complex, competitive, intellectual environment.

Engage your full potential. Fuel your spark.

About this title

About the Author

Kevin E. Houchin is an attorney, artist, teacher, author, and principal of Houchin & Associates, P.C., a copyright, trademark, arts & entertainment, business development, and branding firm located in Fort Collins, Colorado.

From the Back Cover

Can you imagine your career as a fun, exciting, rewarding and balanced part of your larger life purpose? If you can, you're already on the right track to making the legal profession better than it is today. If you can't, then it's time to start and this book will help.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

"It is well-known that lawyers suffer higher rates of depression, anxiety, and other mental illness, suicide, divorce, alcoholism and drug abuse, and poor physical health than the general population or other occupations...

It is less well-known that these problems begin in law school."
- Best Practices for Legal Education, p. 30

Can you imagine your legal career as a fun, exciting, rewarding and balanced part of your larger life purpose? If you can, you're already on the right track to making the legal profession better than it is today. If you can't, then it's time to start and this book will help.

When I started thinking about law school, I bought every book I could find. Titles like Slaying the Law School Dragon, Law School Confidential, and Planet Law School, became tactical resources for success in the law school classroom. Books like these tell you how to brief cases, introduce you to the Socratic method, and give you an overview of some of the required course material.

These books were helpful to me and they'll probably be helpful to you. But these books won't tell you how to balance all the challenges you'll face in law school while still holding onto the values and ideals you take to campus.

I was at a legal conference earlier this year and we were asked to write down all the things we enjoyed about law school on sheets of yellow paper and all the things we hated about law school - things that hurt us emotionally - on pieces of pink paper. Out of 30 people, only I and one other person wrote anything on the "good" yellow sheets of paper. That's sad, but it's the norm.

Law school is notorious for taking bright, idealistic, values-inspired young (and not-so-young) people and turning them into something else. This doesn't happen to everyone, and it didn't happen to me. But it takes some conscious effort to avoid the common pitfalls of legal education.

What separates those who end up with comments on the "good" yellow sheets? Context.

I'm definitely no smarter than any of my peers, and probably no smarter than you. But I was older when I started law school. I wasn't learning life out of a case book. I'd been married and divorced. I'd been through civil litigation. I'd worked for and been fired from companies. I'd started companies and failed. I'd started companies and succeeded. I'd bought and sold houses. I'd negotiated hundreds of contracts. I'd spent the previous three years traveling on business. When I quit my job to start law school I had plenty of time to do the work, but I also had time to think about the context within which I hoped to implement what I was about to learn.

That's the key to a successful and even fun law school experience: CONTEXT. Even if you are not older or don't have as much life experience, my goal in this book is to give you that context through a short list of five simple, memorable values that will guide you to well-rounded, joyful success in your law school experience. If you keep the following 5 Guiding Values in your mind (or even better, taped to the top of your laptop, or on your screen desktop) you'll be far more likely to keep the challenges of law school in balance with the rest of your life and your ideals. I guarantee it.

In fact, if you follow these guiding values and they DON'T help, just send this book back to me and I'll refund your money.

This book is short for several reasons. First, I want you to actually read it. If you're planning to go to law school, or are already in law school, you know how to read well, fast, and with high retention. You should be able to breeze through these chapters in short sittings. Second, you'll be reading a lot of material for class and I don't want to add to that burden. Third, I believe shorter books that get read again and again are more powerful than large tomes. Fourth, there are only 5 Guiding Values, which fits right into most people's short-term memory capabilities. I want these values to become second nature to you, and they won't if it takes too long to read the book.

We could argue about the words that describe the values - we're lawyers after all and questioning how other people classify thoughts is just part of our collective personality. We could add values to the list, and I'm sure you will. We could probably even reduce the list (NOT a typical lawyer trait). But I like having five principles because it's easy to remember the list by looking at the fingers on one hand. Finally, I believe everything you face in law school, and more importantly in your life after law school, fits nicely into one or more of these categories.

Edition details

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1600375464
• ISBN 13: 9781600375460
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 92