Sarah Cottrell: Hi, and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell. On this show, I interview former lawyers to hear their inspiring stories about how they left law behind to find careers and lives that they love. Let's get right to the show.

Hello everyone. This week on the podcast, I'm sharing the second half of my conversation with Nnamdi Nwaezeapu. Nnamdi, as you know, from a couple of weeks ago is currently a 1L Columbia Law School but he took a two-year leave of absence a couple of years ago from law school to pursue his interest in entrepreneurship. He also wrote a book called Doctor Lawyer Engineer: How to Pursue Your Dreams without Giving Your Parents a Heart Attack. That's specifically geared towards immigrant parents and children of immigrants who are navigating these questions of what to do career-wise and whether to pursue being a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or something else. Go back and listen to the first half of our conversation if you haven't already because it'll give you lots of great context about the book and about Nnamdi's own experience. Let's get into the second half of my conversation with Nnamdi.

Sarah Cottrell: One of the things that really struck me about the book is you talked, in one part of it, about what, for children of immigrants, is really motivating the parents in terms of them saying, “Oh, we want you to go into one of these three careers,” and that yes, there might be that reputational piece, and that can be important, but also that a big piece of it is the security and stability piece and just the perception on the part of the parents that these are the paths and not really having an awareness of paths outside of that.

The reason that struck me is that this comes up even many times with the lawyers that I'm working with who are not necessarily immigrants or children of immigrants but who still have a similar mindset of, “Well, what could there possibly be outside of a very narrow range of things that would provide me with a stable secure job that is respectable?” That's something that I just thought of, that there are unique ways that play out in the dynamic that you wrote about with immigrant parents and their children, but it also is very understandable because that mindset is, in many ways, pervasive even among people who have moved into one of those professions.

One of the conversations that often comes up with lawyers who are thinking about leaving is this question of “What else could I do?” The answer is many things. But the perception is that there isn't a lot that's out there. Can you talk a little bit about your perspective on that?

Nnamdi Nwaezeapu: Yeah. I would actually be interested to hear your thoughts as well, how you frame that to your clients, because I will be frank that being back in the legal—so I'm back in law school, resumed my 1L year—and during my two-year leave of absence where I was pursuing my interest in entrepreneurship, it was a new territory for me; one. I had a large learning curve in that respect. But on top of that, entrepreneurship was one of those up and down things. It's just like you're building the plane as you go so to speak.

That takes a certain toll on your mind, to constantly be in this psychology—even if there was a path that actually I was on, psychologically, when you're building a company or trying to build a company, there is no certainty, you're in an uncertain state all the time.

One of the beautiful things about the law, engineering, medicine, dentistry, nursing, and pharmacy is that even if in reality you can lose your job at a moment's notice as a lawyer or as a doctor—and there are plenty of research that shows this—even if that's true, those industries have done a great job at creating a brand or a perception that your job is secure.

What it does is it creates this psychological peace in your mind that says, “Okay, I now can stop worrying and I'm going to be fine,” even if the truth is that you are just as unsafe as the entrepreneur in terms of your job security. That mental peace that comes from those fields is pretty hard to get rid of.

For example, from the moment that I got back into law school—I'm going to be working for Microsoft this summer as an intern, I got that job—I knew what I needed to say, I knew what I needed to present, I knew how to talk about things, and the certainty was just through the roof. Because of the way that the system is structured, there is a lot of peace that comes with these fields; mental peace.

I have a chapter in the book where there's a vice president of talent—she has a whole chapter in the book—and she talks about some of the other areas where you can find this stability, you can always have a job. This person in particular was working at a startup as a talent specialist—hiring engineers, project managers, and so on and so forth—Actually, in the time intervening between when I interviewed her and the publication of the book, she got let go from the company because of Coronavirus. But within six weeks, she found a new job as the associate vice president at an Israeli bank doing the same talent acquisition work. She's a living proof that there are other industries that have similar stability to the law, medicine, or engineering.

But I think the difficulty for many is learning to overcome that internal bias, that story that you're telling yourself that things will only be okay if you're in one of the big three. I don't have an answer, unfortunately. There's no cure-all. It is a process that I think happens through working with someone like you, basically, like a coach, working with someone in a community of people who are all trying to navigate that same path.

I think that is where you can, perhaps, find some of that comfort, find some of that mental peace that I'm with a group of people who are all trying to go out into the unknown so to speak. But I would be interested to hear how you handled that for some of your clients.

Sarah Cottrell: I think there are a couple of things and you touched on a few of them. One is just the stories that you tell yourself. Like you said, you can tell yourself a story that only jobs in this certain area or only the current job that I'm in is secure and everything else is insecure. In most cases, you just need to interrogate the story a little bit like, “Is this actually a story that's based in facts and reality, or is this just a story that's based in assumptions?” Or when I actually think about whether it's true, I know that it's not actually true, I think that's part of it.

A big part of that is why I created this podcast originally, which is to help people develop an imagination for what is possible, to see, to the extent, that security and stability is something that they care about—which most people do—that there are more options than maybe they have in their mind.

I think the other piece of it that is important is there's a phrase we use with our kids that I actually find to be very helpful in lots of areas of life. We say two things can be true. For example, we're going to turn the TV off now, no more TV today. You can be upset but the TV is still turning off. Two things can be true, you feel you don't want to go to bed and it's time for bed. Do you see what I'm saying? It's the reality that there can be two things that are both true and maybe there are some feelings around it.

I think there’s somewhat of a dynamic there sometimes with this question which is, in one sense, it's true that nothing is secure, even the professions or jobs that we perceive as being incredibly secure versus something that's not as secure, a lot of that security is an illusion. I think it's very true to say security is an illusion. On the other hand, there is a reality, like entrepreneurship is one extreme end of it, but there is a difference psychologically for you as a person going through the experience of, “I have a job where I get a steady paycheck and I know what the amount is going to be and I know what day it's going to be on” versus “I'm building something and it's all in flux.”

Part of it is avoiding the extremes, recognizing that I probably have overweighted the security of certain things as opposed to other things, but also yes, I am going to be psychologically impacted by the type of environment that I'm in and some jobs might feel, to me emotionally, less secure than others and it becomes a question of learning how to experience difficult or challenging emotions and not let them completely derail you. I think that is a big part of it.

Nnamdi Nwaezeapu: I think one thing that it brought up for me as you were saying it is I imagine it's the same thing for medicine and engineering. I was working for Mindshine as an account manager, basically, and this was my first time in that kind of role, and I remember feeling like I don't really know whether I am succeeding right now. I think one of the things that's appealing about the law—and I would imagine similar in medicine and engineering—is I have a pretty clear idea of when I'm doing well. I can look at my grades, I can look at what kind of internship I have, I can look at how well I'm billing. Am I billing at the right pace? How are my reviews? What does my bonus look like? I just know when I am doing well.

Whereas if I'm going to go out and be a copywriter, for example, how do I know if I'm writing a good copy? I haven't learned what that looks like. If I'm going out to be a talent person, how do I know when I'm being a good talent person? I think that the lack of awareness around what most lawyers, most med school folks are type A—love having external metrics determine their value—it's like, “Did I get an A?” If you don't have that, I think it does become really hard to visualize how you would succeed because it's like, “Where's the A? Where am I going to get my A's from?”

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think this is a really important point and it's one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on the podcast, because I think sometimes people interact with me and they think like other lawyers and they're like, “Oh, my goodness. If I don't leave the law or I don't want to leave the law, Sarah thinks I'm a horrible failure.” It's really not the case at all.

I think one of the things though that is important for anyone, regardless of whether they end up choosing to leave or choosing to stay, is grappling with this thing that you just talked about which is, “Okay, how much is my internal feeling of being okay tied to feeling like I'm on the right path?” Regardless of what path you ultimately end up on, whether it's in the law or outside of it, doing that work to disentangle, or at least have an awareness of the fact that those dynamics are at play, is really important because I think some of the huge issues that we see in the profession are because there are people who are deriving—and we've talked about this in the podcast before—but all of their self-worth and they feel that—I don't know if they would articulate it this way—their entire value as a person is tied up in their ability to achieve on that specific set path. Whether you are a lawyer or ultimately choose not to be, or whatever profession you're in, that is something that is not psychologically healthy for you.

Nnamdi Nwaezeapu: At all.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think it's really important for people to see that you can question the path, that you can “deviate” from the path. The reality is that people who are going to law school often think in very black and white terms. It's either this or it's that. It's very stark. It's like, “This decision or that decision. If I do this thing, then I can't do that.”

I think the more that we can encourage people to see that you can take a circuitous path, you can do this and then you can do that, you can do that and then realize, “Hmm, actually, I think this other thing is…” and all of those things are reasonable and all you need—I'm going to say all you need to do but it's a big thing—is understand what stories you're telling yourself about those choices. If we can do that, in general, the world would just be better for so many lawyers.

Nnamdi Nwaezeapu: Yeah.. It's really, really crazy. What's crazy is my decision to leave and take a leave, in fact, it came from the binary thinking in some way that the only way I was going to end up being an entrepreneur is if I fully went with both feet. It took me a lot of gusto to do that. But the crazy thing is that had I not done that, I would have felt like I was foreclosed from that reality of becoming an entrepreneur. I think that's the source of so much of people's suffering, it's not necessarily about you just gotta lock into this path and then everything is going to be fine, it's learning how to build out slowly.

I talk about this a lot in the book. There's a chapter where I talk about Mark Manson, he has a blog basically, and one blog article that he wrote about was his dream of becoming a rock star and he thought for so many years that he wanted to be a rock star. But when he really got down to it, what he wanted was to be on a stage and have millions of people cheering his name and singing his songs, but he didn't want to do all the tiny stuff that would lead to him being a rock star—showing up to shows and nobody was there, having people make fun of his music—Nobody thinks about those steps, usually, when it comes to what they want to do.

I think if you can, like you said, start questioning some of the stories you're telling yourself and then I would say building in slowly, start building the life that you want, and doing in a piecemeal approach as opposed to jumping straight off the ship—you can do either one—but I do think that building slowly, starting to broaden your idea of what is possible in a slow and methodical way is a much better approach than just thinking about things as either it's this or it's that.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that's so true. I've talked about this in the podcast a couple of times I know, but this is something that I really want all lawyers to hear because I feel like there is this sense of, “Well, either I just keep doing this forever or I quit today and just do something completely radical.” That's not my story. My story is by two or three years in, I knew I didn't want to do it forever but I practiced for 10 years total. Part of that was because we had some priorities regarding having kids and paying off our student loans.

I did make a shift from the original job that I was in to something that felt more sustainable for me because 10 years is a long time. But the options don't have to be complete misery and total destruction of the self, pure bliss, or whatever. Not only those don't have to be the options, those aren't the options like in the universe are those your two options generally speaking.

I think not approaching this thought process of, “What should I be doing with my career as I will either pick the correct option which leads to unadulterated happiness, or the wrong option which will mean I am doomed to a life of misery and despair?” even if you pick an option where you end up in misery and despair, you still have the ability to make other choices.

Nnamdi Nwaezeapu: I think about the name of your company, Former Lawyer. For me, when I hear that, I think about the idea of removing one's identity from being a lawyer. Because being a lawyer has this super strong idea of everything that comes with that.

There are so many trappings that come with identifying as a lawyer. As a result, your choice set for what you can do with your life becomes super, super narrow. How you present on Twitter, how you present on Facebook, what car you buy, all of this stuff frequently comes from this really strong identification as a lawyer.

If you can learn how to pull yourself away from seeing who you are as a human being, as being a lawyer, that your entire identity is a lawyer, then the world opens up and there becomes tons of options, some may be staying where you are doing legal work but it's like, “My name is Nnamdi and I do legal work,” as opposed to, “I am a lawyer and I do lawyer things and I wear lawyer clothes.” I can now approach life as myself as opposed to making decisions based on what lawyers are supposed to do.

Sarah Cottrell: One-hundred percent. I completely agree. Talk briefly just for people who are wondering about the process for you in terms of deciding to go back at the end of your leave of absence and how you ended up where you are today.

Nnamdi Nwaezeapu: Writing the book was like a form of therapy for me in some ways, talking to all these different people who had taken different approaches and reflecting on my experience over the past few years. The realization that I came to was that when I was pursuing my interest in entrepreneurship, it was a reaction to suddenly feeling like being a lawyer was not as prestigious as I once thought it to be.

Although I enjoyed the work that I did as a lawyer or as a paralegal, although I loved every second of it, when I found out that people despised lawyers and that there were jokes about kill all the lawyers and there were all my friends who were not lawyers being critical of my decision to be a lawyer, it was like I made this decision that I gotta go do something else, I can't do that.

There's an important chapter for me, the biggest thing that stuck with me was there's a woman, her name is Neha Sobti, she's an actress in LA. She was like me, she was supposed to be going to law school, she ultimately decided to go and try and become an actress in LA. The thing that she said when I asked her for her advice—because it had been a struggle for her, a real, real struggle, you can search her name and search for Refinery29, she has a great interview on there—was that her advice to anyone who is unsure about what to do is just take a second and visualize, do you think that you could live a good life, an enjoyable life as a lawyer, as a doctor, as an engineer? She said, “If you can, then you should do that. But if you can't imagine doing anything else but acting, learning how to become a copywriter, or doing whatever, then you have to pursue that dream.”

For me, I knew that I enjoyed legal practice. I loved everything about it. I think it was a combination of her advice in learning about the sacrifices that my parents had made and realizing that I could achieve what I want in life through finishing my legal degree or finishing my law program. It would be a satisfying decision for me. I got to really put all the noise aside and really just think about what would bring me the most satisfaction.

For me, the decision ended up being that finishing, getting my degree, and bringing joy to my family, getting them their return on their investment and down the line pursuing whatever other interest that I have was the most satisfying choice for me. I think that for anyone who is trying to make this decision, my suggestion—and it's what I suggest at the end of the book—kind of like what you said, is to in interrogate the stories you're telling yourself, really try to avoid applying some blanket rule about what you should do, and just really look internally and make a decision that feels satisfying based on your reality, not based on what someone says is the best thing for you to do.

That's how I made my decision and I am now back in school, happy as a law student surprisingly, going to do a great internship at Microsoft that I can't wait for. I'm going to get the experience of working with all the early stage companies that I have wanted to work with and it doesn't foreclose my ability to do what I want down the road.

But just as many of the stories as I present in the book, you can also go the other way and there are great, great resources available—like the work you do with Former Lawyer—to help you make that transition as smoothly as possible.

Sarah Cottrell: I love all of that. I will say when you said that you loved billing, I was like, “Clearly, this is the path for him.”

Nnamdi, is there anything else, as we're coming to the end of our conversation, that you would like to share that we haven't had a chance to talk about yet?

Nnamdi Nwaezeapu: Yes. First, I will do a shameless plug for my pet project, University of Good, just talk about ways to build a happier and healthier life there. You can go to universityofgood.com for that. Second, I have a consulting practice for those who are earlier up the stream. If you haven't started law school, medical school, or your engineering program and you want some thoughts or advice about how to either build a life that's enjoyable within that space or go the other way, you can go to noodle.consulting and make an appointment with me there.

I believe you will put all my socials and whatnot in the show notes, but most importantly, the thing I want to say is that to anyone who is listening to this and you're in that crucial moment where you are trying to decide whether to go one way or the other, if you truly imagine yourself on your deathbed and if you look back from that time, would you regret not going after the thing or going after the person? If you do that visualization and the answer is yes, I one hundred-thousand zillion percent ask you to go and do it because although your journey will be filled with some of the craziest bumps, ups and downs, and pain that you will ever experience in your life, that journey, I promise you, will teach you so much about yourself, will help you grow in ways that you couldn't have imagined, and you will feel the deepest satisfaction that there is to experience. That's my take on that. But obviously, you gotta do what you ought to do in life.

Sarah Cottrell: It's so good. Nnamdi, thank you so much for writing this book and for sharing your story with us today.

Nnamdi Nwaezeapu: Absolutely, and thank you for having me.

Sarah Cottrell: Thanks so much for listening. I absolutely love getting to share this podcast with you. If you haven't yet, I invite you to download my free guide: First Steps to Leaving the Law at formerlawyer.com/first. Until next time, have a great week.