Stretch

The only source of knowledge is experience.

—Albert Einstein

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

5 BE GREEDY ABOUT EXPERIENCES

The Tale of Two Attorneys

Julie specializes in banking policy in Washington D.C. and Jarred Taylor specializes in Internet and technology law in San Francisco. Both discovered a passion for law in two very different ways.

Julie, a Houston native, was a psychology major in college. Jarred, born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, was a political science major. Julie thought she wanted to be a clinical psychologist until she spent a summer working at a state-funded mental institution in North Carolina. Jarred’s interests, on the other hand, shifted from diplomacy to intelligence, and he even applied for a CIA internship. By the time he graduated college, he was focused on working in a legal environment so that he could test out whether he liked the law before applying to law schools.

After graduating college, Julie took a position with a major bank in New York City. Her first assignment in due diligence was, in her words, “just boring.” In her second year, she angled for a split assignment that gave her experience reporting on risk for various countries and doing qualitative industry analysis. “I learned a lot,” she recalls, including that she liked highly regulated industries.

After two years at the bank, it was an easy call to quit. Most days were uninspiring, and she felt ...