(Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for FORTUNE)
I went to see Justice Elena Kagan speak this week. She was interviewed about the makeup of the Supreme Court, the logistics of becoming a justice despite having never previously donned a judicial robe, and her unlikely friendship with the late Antonin Scalia. She was careful with her answers, and kept the mostly fawning audience fully engaged. While I was underwhelmed by her defense of the institution she’s a part of as being far less political than people think (it’s basically the same one you hear from any of the justices whenever one of them speaks: all the justices are best buddies despite their differences in legal philosophy, they decide about half their cases unanimously, etc.), she did defend writers like yours truly when her interviewer bashed “the press” as having simplistic thinking about the political bents of the justices (there is a “great group” of reporters covering the Supreme Court, according to Justice Kagan).
But what really struck me as being worthy of passing along in my column this week was Justice Kagan’s admirable self-awareness about her own career path. There is hardly a lawyer in the United States who hasn’t, at least in a daydream, imagined a future that ended with a seat on the Supreme Court. In Justice Kagan’s opinion, such ambitions are pretty much futile, however. The most important factor in her winding up on the highest court in the land is one that she had no control over: Luck.
[I]t’s like a lightning strike to get on the Supreme Court.
Justice Kagan believes it takes so much luck to get onto the Supreme Court that she compared it to a “lightning strike.” She described most careers, her own included, as being “a matter of luck and serendipity.”
That is such a refreshing take from a person in a position of extreme power. Many CEOs, top government officials, and celebrities will throw out a token acknowledgment of being lucky or having been “blessed” in obtaining success, but still ultimately attribute it to some combination of hard work and innate talent. Justice Kagan, no doubt, worked very hard in her career, and she is a very talented jurist. But she candidly acknowledges that there are plenty of other lawyers with just as much talent, who work just as hard, who are not sitting where she is now simply because of luck — because of random chance that worked out in her favor.
Now, Justice Kagan certainly wasn’t saying that any individual lawyer has no control over his or her career path. Probably her best career advice, knowing that in this profession we tend to be obsessive planners, was to keep your eye out for where you should get off of your predetermined plan. Justice Kagan herself had always had goals, including one that would have taken her out of the legal profession entirely. But many of her career goals became superseded by new opportunities that arose. And she’s the first to admit that while the public only sees the opportunities that she seized on and that worked out for her, there are plenty of failures (like doing “really poorly” in her first semester of law school), and jobs she sought but never obtained, that are not highlighted in her background. Getting back up after these setbacks and continuing forward put her in a position to take advantage of later opportunities when they presented themselves.
Nobody should be floored by any particular disappointment.
While she described it as being “magical thinking,” a type of reasoning she seemed to find distasteful, at least in the context of career ambitions, Justice Kagan believes that when a door closes, a window opens. It certainly did for her.
We all want to succeed in our careers, to reap financial rewards, and to make a positive contribution to society with our work. But we shouldn’t beat ourselves up if we don’t make it to the absolute top in our fields — assuming you’ve worked hard, the fact that you’re not at the top is probably much more attributable to luck than any personal failures. And we should always scan the horizon for new opportunities, even, maybe especially, when they conflict with our best-laid plans. If you can do those things, you still probably won’t end up on the Supreme Court like Justice Kagan. But you will give yourself the chance to see that window sliding open every time a door is slammed in your face.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.