This is a message to young law firm associates:

Your law firm cares about your personal and professional growth. But make no mistake, the law is a business – often a cutthroat one. Your firm has made a big investment in you in terms of salary, benefits, training and overhead. It expects a return on that investment. As a young lawyer, it’s important to understand how your firm perceives your value, and to a great extent it comes down to dollars and cents.

Law firms rely on leverage, which means having lots of associates in place to work and bill. Young associates should understand they are typically less valuable (in terms of dollars and cents) to their firms than their mid-level and senior associate colleagues. It’s a fact of life in today’s economic environment that clients are less willing to (as they see it) subsidize the on-the-job training of young lawyers by paying for unproductive time. This means that as a young lawyer you must be productive and effective – and not just busy – to stand out.

How many times have you read a book or blog post, listened to a keynote or podcast, and been inspired to take on the world? You know the feeling. The writer or speaker drops a bunch of knowledge bombs which open your mind to new possibilities. You can barely wait to get back to the office and start implementing everything you’ve learned.

So you sit down at your desk, pull out your legal pad and create a cascading flowchart full of goals, with a corresponding laundry list of to-do items. You’re pumped. You’re ready. Time to go big. This time it will be different.

But then it’s not. In fact, if you’re anything like me, you never even get started. The legal pad that you were so excited about sits undisturbed on the corner of your desk. Pretty soon it gets filed away with all the others. You go back to doing things the same way you always have.

Sound familiar. Feel familiar? It does to me. At least it used to.

There’s a great deal that the legal industry can learn from the technology industry. A good starting point is Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup, which is filled ideas that are just as valuable (perhaps more valuable) for large, institutional law firms as they are for fast-growing tech startups.

Another great source of ideas and inspiration is the unstoppable force that is Jeff Bezos and his Amazon empire. Bezos has many powerful mantras for his business, but this is one of my favorites: It’s always “Day 1” at Amazon.

What he means is that Amazon will never stop being a startup. It’s a message Bezos drilled down on in a recent letter to shareholders (written from a building he works in named “Day 1”), in which he wrote:

“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”

There’s a misconception in the marketplace that the issues of personal branding for lawyers and business development for lawyers are distinct concepts. This post is meant to dispel this misunderstanding. It all comes down to appreciating the fact business development in the legal industry is a long game played over many years, and that the key to building a sustainable book of business is building a strong personal brand.

A short-term approach to business development requires the hard sell. This approach is colorfully demonstrated in the classic movie “Glengarry Glen Ross,” in which Alec Baldwin’s infamous character, Blake, admonishes a group of real estate salesmen to “ABC: Always Be Closing.”

We’ve all dealt with salespeople who take the ABC hard sell approach. Sometimes it even works, especially when what they’re selling is a commodity, or some other inexpensive product or service that we might happen to need at the moment. Despite the salesperson’s off-putting approach, we buy because it’s convenient to do so at the moment. Or we just want to get the person off the phone or off the porch.

It even works when selling legal services. What else could explain the prevalence of attorney billboards blaring 1-800 vanity phone numbers lining many cities’ highways and byways?

The practice of law has changed in many important ways over the years, but in many others it has not. In today’s cutthroat, competitive culture, we have a tendency to romanticize what things were like in the legal profession “back in the day.”

When we think of the “Giants” of our profession, those who left a lasting, indelible impact, names such as Darrow, Webster and Marshall come to mind. These lawyers shared many similar characteristics, including intelligence, courage and high ethical standards. They also lacked something that almost all lawyers today have in common: none graduated from law school. They read the books. They apprenticed. They learned by doing. And in the process they shaped the law, and the legal profession, in ways that are studied in law school classrooms across the country today.

Abraham Lincoln followed a similar path. We’ve all heard the stories of Lincoln studying his law books by candlelight in a log cabin. He lacked the formal legal training that is taken for granted in today’s profession. But while Lincoln may not have had a Harvard law degree, he – like many other legal stalwarts – learned through the school of hard knocks the principles and practices of what it takes to become a successful and respected lawyer.

When I was a young associate, every time I sent an email to a partner or client that included work product or a bit of analysis I found myself eagerly anticipating a “pat on the back” email back in my inbox. As you may have guessed, those pats on the back rarely came.

That’s life in a law firm! But it’s a lesson that took me some time to learn. Too often, I found my mood shifting with the winds – and whims – of the day’s feedback. What I finally learned is that as a law firm associate you need to learn to look for approval within yourself, and not from external sources.

But that’s easier said then done. In order to have that type of measured mindset, young associates need some tools in their toolboxes. One of the most effective is an “oldie but goodie” called Stoicism.

“What would happen if I did the opposite?”. It’s an approach that worked for George Costanza in a classic Seinfeld episode, but it’s rarely something we think about – let alone act upon – in real life.

Doing the opposite – going against the grain, bucking conventional wisdom – can be scary. It can result in failure. It welcomes skepticism. It invites derision. It makes people uncomfortable. It’s especially frowned upon in the slow-to-innovate legal industry.

It is also the indispensable action that is inextricably linked to virtually every breakthrough idea that has moved the needle of human progress forward.

Conventional wisdom is, by definition, a generally accepted theory or belief. Any action or idea that is contrary to conventional wisdom is, therefore, generally not accepted, and the person propounding it is considered wrongheaded and counter-cultural – that is, until the radical is proven right, and the new idea replaces the old. As Albert Einstein said: “The only sure way to never make mistakes is to have no new ideas.”

Put more simply, rejecting conventional wisdom is risk taking.

I live in a small town in northern Michigan called Traverse City. It’s a quaint, picturesque town of 17,000 residents, although the population, hustle and bustle of the area swells during the summer months. People flock from all over the world to enjoy the beauty of Lake Michigan and the incredible food, wine and craft beer scene that this region offers.

Over the last five years (my family has lived here two years), Traverse City has experienced tremendous growth, both in its primary industries of tourism, hospitality and agriculture, as well as new industries such as technology. There’s even a new tech incubator here, and an angel fund that was formed to help attract and cultivate the growing number of startups in the area.

The entrepreneurial scene is booming. Interesting and creative new businesses are opening every week here. Young people and young families looking for a different way of life continue to migrate here from busy urban areas at a steady clip. They’re building businesses around their lives, rather than lives around their businesses. A risk taking ecosystem and ethos has taken hold.

But it wasn’t always this way. In fact, it wasn’t at all this way just a few years ago. And it didn’t happen by accident.