BusinessLawGuy's Blog

Jerry Garcia once said, “You ain’t gonna learn what you don’t wanna know.” It sounds like something you’d hear in a parking lot before a Grateful Dead show, and maybe it was. But the more I think about it, the more it strikes me as one of the truest things anyone has said about learning. Information is everywhere. Teachers, mentors, data, and feedback are all around us. None of it does any good if we close the door on it.

I see this play out in my practice all the time. A client comes in certain they have a slam-dunk case, and when I start walking through the weak spots and risks, I watch them stop listening. They hear the parts that support their position and tune out the rest. The problem is that the judge, the jury, or opposing counsel won’t tune it out. Attorneys are not immune either. I have known lawyers who refused to learn new technology, brushed off feedback from a partner, or assumed the way they handled a matter twenty years ago still works today. In every case, the knowledge they needed was right in front of them. They simply didn’t want it.

Business owners face the same temptation, and the stakes are just as high. It might be the monthly financials that keep getting pushed to the bottom of the pile because the cash flow picture is ugly. It might be a pattern of customer complaints written off as a few cranky people, or a competitor quietly taking market share while leadership insists nothing has changed. I’ve had more than one conversation with an owner who, looking back at a failed deal or a situation that went sideways, admitted the warning signs were there. Willful blindness feels comfortable in the moment. Over time it becomes expensive, and sometimes it costs you the business.

The good news is that wanting to know is a choice, and it’s one you can make today. Start by being honest with yourself about what you’ve been avoiding, the conversation you keep putting off, or the report you haven’t opened. Ask the people around you what you might be missing, and then resist the urge to argue when they answer. Uncomfortable truths are rarely fun to hear, but they are almost always useful. So what is it that you don’t wanna know right now, and what might you learn if you let yourself find out? As Garcia sang, “Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.”

There’s an old saying, credited to so many people over the years that I’ve stopped trying to figure out who said it first, that the harder you work the luckier you get. I’d tweak it a bit. Hard work doesn’t make you lucky, but it puts you in the path of luck far more often than sitting still ever will. When I look back at the clients I’ve gained over my career, many of those relationships started with what looked like a lucky break: a referral out of the blue, a phone call at just the right moment, a chance conversation at an event I almost skipped. The truth is that none of those moments happened by accident.

Think about what actually goes into “luck” for a lawyer or any other professional. That referral came because someone remembered I did good work on a matter years earlier and got it done when I said I would. The call came because I had kept in touch with someone even when there was no business reason to do so. The conversation happened because I showed up after a long day at the office when going home would have been so much easier. Each of those was a small deposit made long before anyone could see a return. From the outside it looks like good fortune, and I’ll gladly take it, but I know where it came from.

The flip side matters too. When you coast, opportunities still come around; you just aren’t ready for them or aren’t in the room when they arrive. The young associate who knows the file cold is the one who gets pulled into a big trial when a senior partner gets sick the week before. The business owner who has spent months building relationships is the one a larger company calls when it needs a vendor on short notice. If you haven’t done the work, you may never even know what you missed, because the chance quietly went to someone who had. That isn’t bad luck. It’s the math of preparation.

None of this is a guarantee, and I won’t pretend otherwise. You can work incredibly hard and still have things go sideways, which is part of life for all of us. What hard work does is tilt the odds. It multiplies the number of doors that crack open and makes sure you’re standing close enough to walk through one when it does. So ask yourself honestly how many chances you’re giving luck to find you. If the answer isn’t many, the good news is that changing it is entirely up to you, and you can start today