BusinessLawGuy's Blog

Dolly Parton passed away yesterday at 80, and by last night my feed was already full of thoughtful quotes her fans refer to as “Dollyisms, repeated so many times they are remembered. That happens with people who spend seven decades telling the truth in a way nobody minds hearing. You don’t get quoted that much by accident. You get quoted that much because you kept saying things that were simple on the surface and heavy underneath, and people kept needing to hear them.

The line of hers I keep coming back to is “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” I have sat across the table from a lot of professionals and business owners over the years, and the ones who struggle are almost never short on effort. They are short on clarity about what they’re actually building and why. They copied a competitor’s model, took on the kind of clients everyone told them to take, structured the business the way it’s “supposed” to be structured, and then wondered why none of it feels like theirs. Dolly built an empire out of rhinestones and a voice nobody else had, and she never once apologized for either. There is a lesson in that for any attorney running a practice or professional running a company: the version of you that is a slightly toned-down imitation of somebody more successful will never outwork the version of you that actually knows what it’s doing and why.

She also said, “Don’t get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life,” and if you have spent any time around attorneys or entrepreneurs, you know exactly which people that line is aimed at. My profession rewards the person who answers the email at 11 p.m. and bills the extra hour, right up until it doesn’t, right up until that person looks up from the desk and realizes the kids are grown, the marriage is strained, and the calendar has no memory of anything but work. Dolly wrote and performed for decades, built a theme park, ran a business empire, and still managed to be the person everybody describes as warm, present, and generous with her time. That’s not an accident. She never treated the living part as the reward you get after the working part is finished. She did them at the same time, on purpose, the same way she approached everything else.

Put those two sayings together and you get something closer to a business philosophy than a couple of nice quotes for a eulogy. Know who you are well enough to build something that actually reflects it, and build it in a way that leaves room for an actual life while you’re doing it. Most professionals get halfway there. They figure out their niche, their brand, their differentiator, and then they let the making-a-living part swallow everything else anyway. Dolly Parton won’t be remembered for how many hours she logged. She will be remembered for who she was and for showing up as that person in front of everybody, every single day, for all those years. That’s the whole assignment, for a business or a life. Find out who you are, do it on purpose, and don’t forget to actually live while you’re doing it.

We tell ourselves a story about limits, and the story is almost never true. It holds you back even when you have talent or are in the right circumstance. This happens because of people’s fears. Fear is clever that way. It rarely announces itself. It shows up disguised as “I’m just being practical” or “now isn’t the right time,” and because it sounds so reasonable, you believe it. You mistake the voice of fear for the voice of good judgment, and then you spend years living inside a boundary that was never actually there.

Nobody will tell you that the fence around your ability is almost always one you built yourself, out of assumptions nobody asked you to make. You assume the the answer to the questions and aspirations you have is no, so you don’t try. Maybe you assume you’re not ready and wait for a readiness that conveniently never arrives. Each of these assumptions feels like information but it isn’t. It’s fear, doing what fear does best, which is to convince you that your assumptions are right. The tragedy isn’t that you might fail if you tried. The tragedy is when you never find out because you talk yourself out of trying.

I have watched this play out with attorneys who had every capability required to grow and advance professionally, and who instead spend years circling the same safe distance from their own potential. It’s as if they built a wall, brick by brick, out of a hundred small moments where fear won the argument and they let it. The professionals who break out of this are not the ones who feel less fear. They have just stopped mistaking a feeling for fact, and they have gotten good at asking a simple question before they back away from something: is this a real wall, or is it just fear wearing a disguise.

The good news is that once you see the pattern, you cannot unsee it. You start noticing how often “I can’t” really means “I’m afraid to find out.” That is not a comfortable realization, but it is a useful one, because it hands you back the ability to make a choice about things you thought had already been made for you. The limit you have been respecting for years may have never been a limit at all. It may have simply been the loudest voice in the room, your voice. Stop listening, and the fence you thought was there has a funny way of disappearing.

A few weeks ago I was standing inside a restaurant by the front door, waiting to be seated with my daughter and extended family in front of me. A man who looked like he might be homeless rode up on a bike, stopped, walked in, and came up quietly behind me. Before I even knew he was there, he put his hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Be the difference you want to see in the world.” I said the only thing that came out, “Exactly,” loud enough that my family heard it too, and for a second nobody quite knew what to do with what had just happened. As I responded, he was gone, back out the door, back on the bike, back into the evening.

I will be honest that my first reaction was not gratitude, it was confusion. A stranger you don’t see coming putting a hand on you is the kind of moment that could have gone a very different direction, and I don’t think you get to skip past that part of the story just because it turned out fine. But it did turn out fine, and what was left once the surprise wore off was a sentence that has been sitting with me ever since, delivered by someone who had every reason to be asking me for something and instead handed me something of value.

The professional world runs on the assumption that change comes from the top, from the policy, from the person with the title and the budget. In practice, the culture of an office, a firm, or a courtroom hallway gets built one interaction at a time, by whoever decides to hold the door, give the credit, or tell the hard truth kindly instead of avoiding it. Nobody is waiting for permission to do that, and nobody needs a title to start. You do not need to run the company to be the reason a colleague has a better day than they expected to.

The same is true away from the office, waiting for a table with people who matter to you, which is exactly where I was when I heard it. I have no idea why that man stopped instead of riding past the restaurant. But he stopped, walked in, and said what he said. That is the whole lesson, and it doesn’t require a bike, a whisper, or a chance encounter to apply it. It requires deciding, in whatever room you happen to be standing in, that you are the one who is going to make it a little better, a little kinder, or a little more honest than you found it. Nobody is going to assign you that job. You have to take it.

I learned so much from reading. Which sparks ideas. Try it. That’s really the whole thesis, and I could stop right there, but the old ad line deserves better than a one-sentence drive-by. Reading Is Fundamental was a public service campaign decades before anyone worried about attention spans and doom-scrolling, and it turns out the slogan undersold itself. Reading isn’t just fundamental to literacy. It’s fundamental to how professionals think, argue, negotiate, and eventually distinguish themselves from everyone else doing the same job the same way.

Books in particular do something a headline or a hot take cannot. A good book gives you the long version, the reasoning behind the conclusion, the mistakes the author made getting there. That is where ideas actually come from. Not from information alone, but from watching someone else’s thinking unfold across three hundred pages. You absorb a way of approaching problems, and one day it surfaces in a client meeting as an idea nobody else in the room had, because nobody else in the room had read that book. Magazines and blogs do their own version of this on a shorter timeline, but books ask more of you, and they give more back.

There’s a professional payoff here too, beyond the ideas themselves. Reading gives you something to talk about with people who are not talking about the same three things everyone else is talking about. Walk into a room able to reference something you read last month and you become memorable in a way that “how about this weather” never accomplishes. Clients remember the lawyer who connected their situation to something from outside the practice of law. It costs you nothing but the reading itself, and it pays you back in relationships and reputation.

None of this needs to be homework. Some of the best reading you can do has nothing to do with sharpening your professional edge at all. Pick up a novel, a memoir, something with no obvious application to your caseload or your quarterly numbers, and let it pull you away from work for an hour. That distance is its own kind of value, separate from whatever idea might come out of it later. So read the dense industry book if that’s what the moment calls for, but read the paperback that has nothing to do with your job too. Reading is fundamental precisely because it works on you in ways you can’t predict and can’t force. You just have to keep doing it and let it find you when you need it.