BusinessLawGuy's Blog

Warren Zevon was dying when he sat down with David Letterman for the last time in 2002. He had been diagnosed with terminal cancer just months before. Letterman, visibly moved, asked him if facing death had given him any special wisdom to share. What Zevon said was simple. He said he had always enjoyed himself, but that the enjoyment was more valuable now. He said you are reminded to enjoy every sandwich, every minute of playing with the band, being with the kids, all of it. Not a grand pronouncement. Not a theory of life. Just a reminder to actually be present for the good things while they are in front of you, because one day they won’t be.

Most of us, in business and in life, are remarkably bad at this. We close a deal and immediately move to the next one. We finish a hard project, exhale for about forty-five seconds, and open the next email. We hit a milestone and treat it as nothing more than a checkpoint on the way to somewhere else. We have conditioned ourselves to treat achievement as a transaction and celebration as an indulgence, when in fact it is the opposite. Pausing to mark a win, to look around at the people who made it possible and actually say something real to them, is not a distraction from the work – it’s the point of the work.

The best professionals I know understand that the small moments are not the gaps between the important ones. They are the important ones. The lunch where you laugh until your sides hurt. The Friday afternoon where the whole team sits together and just talks for a while. The client who calls just to say thank you. These moments are what make a career worth having. They are also what keep good people around you. People stay in relationships where they don’t feel invisible. They stay where they feel seen and valued.

Zevon’s insight wasn’t about mortality, even though that was the context. It was about attention. It was a reminder that enjoyment is a practice, not something that happens automatically when conditions are good enough. You have to choose to be present for it. You have to put down the phone, close the laptop, look at the person across from you, and let yourself feel the fact that something good is happening right now. Build that into how you work. Celebrate deliberately. Acknowledge the people around you with the same energy you bring to solving problems. So, the next time there is a reason to celebrate, don’t save it for later, eat the sandwich.

AI is not the threat to your career. The threat is the attorney down the street, the consultant across town, or the professional sitting two floors below you who has already figured out how to make AI work for them. That person is not smarter than you. They may or may not have more experience. What they have is a willingness to adapt, and in competitive professions, that willingness is currently worth more than almost anything else on a résumé.

The conversation about AI in professional services has been dominated by fear, but that fear is largely misdirected. The model that replaces the judgment of a lawyer or a seasoned professional does not exist. What does exist is a professional who can now do in two hours what used to take eight and have time left to actually think about strategy. That person is not being replaced by a machine — they are being made dramatically more valuable by one. The professional who refuses to engage with that reality is not protecting their craft. They are simply making themselves easier to pass over.

In the legal world specifically, there is an obligation that goes beyond self-interest. Clients hire attorneys because they expect competence, and competence in this moment includes understanding the tools that are reshaping how legal work gets done. Billing six hours for research that an AI-assisted attorney could complete in ninety minutes is not a sustainable model, and clients are beginning to understand that. The attorneys who will thrive are the ones who use AI to sharpen their judgment, accelerate their output, and deliver better work at a price point that reflects the reality of the market. The ones who cling to the inefficiencies of the past will be billing for time, which is not the same thing as delivering value.

This requires the same thing that every meaningful shift in professional life has always required: curiosity, a willingness to be a beginner again, and the discipline to actually put in the time to learn something new. The attorneys and professionals who built successful careers did it by adapting to new areas of law, to new client demands, to new market conditions. AI is not a departure from that pattern. It is the latest version of it. The only question worth asking right now is whether you are going to be the person who integrates it and pulls ahead, or the person who watches someone else do it and wonders what happened.

Nobody escapes the curriculum. Life keeps teaching, and it does not care whether you’re ready for the lesson. That is especially true in business, where the stakes are high, the pace is relentless, and the temptation to believe you have figured it out is both understandable and dangerous. The moment you stop staying curious and open, you stop growing. In a competitive environment, standing still is the same as falling behind.

The lessons don’t always arrive in the form you expect or prefer. Sometimes a trusted employee leaves, or a long-standing relationship sours, and you realize in hindsight that the warning signs were there all along. The difference between professionals who grow from those moments and those who don’t isn’t intelligence, it’s willingness. Willingness to sit with the discomfort of being wrong, to examine what happened without excuses, and to carry that understanding forward into the next situation. The lesson was always available. The question is whether you chose to receive it.

What makes life such an insistent teacher is that it will keep presenting the same situation in different packaging until you actually learn what it came to teach you. In my world, the attorney who keeps losing clients over communication issues and keeps blaming the clients hasn’t learned the lesson. Nor has the business owner who has cycled through three difficult partners and blamed each of them. At some point, the common denominator in your recurring problems is worth examining. That is not a comfortable conversation to have with yourself, but it is a necessary one. The professionals who are willing to have it tend to be the ones who build something that actually lasts.

The good news is that accepting life as your teacher doesn’t require perfection. It just requires a certain kind of intellectual humility that the best professionals carry with them throughout their careers. It requires the recognition that you don’t have all the answers, that the world keeps changing, and that there is always something more to learn. That posture keeps you sharp. It keeps you asking better questions, listening more carefully, and staying genuinely engaged with your work in ways that rigid expertise never allows. Life is going to teach you whether you want it to or not. You might as well be a good student.