The plan you’re not supposed to have yet

The night before her first law class, Amy Farrugia rang her mother-in-law in a panic. She was convinced someone would make her stand up in front of everyone and recite a law, and that she would have nothing to say.

“I know the traffic rules, and I know crime, I think, but I don’t know a law. I can’t tell you,” she remembers thinking.

She went on to come first in her contracts and criminal law classes.

Farrugia, now an early career solicitor working in policy at the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department, did not come to law the usual way. She missed the cut-off for a combined degree out of high school, spent several years as a freelance writer and only found out the Juris Doctor existed by searching online. No one in her family was a lawyer. She had no plan, no map and a steady voice in her head telling her she was not smart enough to be there. What she remembers most from those years is the conviction that everyone around her had it all figured out and she did not.

That feeling is one of the most common in early legal careers, and a good deal of it is manufactured. The profession’s own selection process asks candidates to perform conviction before they have had the exposure that would earn it. Clerkship and graduate applications want to know why you are drawn to this exact practice area, at this exact firm, and where you see yourself in five years, and you are expected to answer as though you already know exactly where your career is heading.

“Do you want me to just lie and say yes,” Farrugia poses, “or do you want me to be honest in my application?”

Everyone learns to perform the certainty the application process seems to reward. So, all anyone sees is everyone else’s certainty, never their doubt, and each person assumes they’re the only one faking it. Jessie Scriven, Law Careers Director at the University of Sydney Law School, runs careers surveys at the law school and says the same result keeps appearing. Most students say they feel like they’re behind their peers. Almost all of them feel it, which means almost none of them are actually behind.

What the early years are for

Scriven’s argument is that the pressure rests on a misunderstanding of what the early years are supposed to do. They are not for arriving at certainty. They are for gathering information. She teaches a simple sequence: explore, plan and act. Her point is that certainty is a product of that process rather than a requirement for starting it.

She learned it herself. At law school she was sure she would be a criminal prosecutor, until she did work experience and found she could not stomach the crime scene photos.

“I’m so happy that I did work experience in my second year and didn’t wait five years to find out,” she says.

She moved into intellectual property, then commercial law, then a run of in-house roles and now runs careers for the University of Sydney Law School. Scriven says her career has been shaped by the experiences she’s had over time, and by her willingness to reflect and pivot towards areas that interested her, are aligned with her values and played to her strengths. In her experience, certainty is not even the thing that separates the people who do well.

“It’s not certainty or uncertainty that sets people apart,” she says. The ones who make progress are those who keep moving and keep learning about themselves, “even when they don’t have all the answers”.

The comparison trap

If certainty was never the goal, comparing yourself to people who seem more certain doesn’t actually tell you anything. Farrugia puts in more bluntly.

“What you’re doing is mind reading, and no one can do that,” she says.

“You’re confusing your feelings with fact. Just because you feel like everyone has a plan, that isn’t a fact.”

A lot of that confidence is performance. Some of the people who sound certain are just as unsure as everyone else, they’re only better at hiding it.

There is a further problem with chasing the certain-looking option, which is that it may not deliver what it appears to. A widely cited US study of several thousand lawyers, by Lawerance Krieger and Kennon Sheldon, found that the things people compete for hardest, such as earnings, prestige and class rank, had almost no relationship to wellbeing. A better predictor of wellbeing was interesting work, a sense of competence and good relationships. The job that looks like winning from the outside is not reliably the one that feels like it from the inside.

None of this makes uncertainty comfortable. It reframes it as information rather than failure, and the useful response is to pay attention to it, notice what draws you in and what you avoid, and to keep testing rather than freeze. Scriven’s advice to anyone who feels behind is encouraging.

“Don’t compare yourself to others,” she says.

“Your career is your career, and no one else’s. Explore your options, test what you like and don’t like, journal your strengths and values, speak to as many people as you can, and try new things. Career development is a lifelong journey. You may not have everything figured out today, but each experience gives you a little more information and brings you a little closer to understanding what is right for you.”

So, if you are a few years in and still cannot say, with absolute certainty, where you will be in five years, it is worth knowing that the certainty around you is part real and part performance. Even the real part is something most people have built slowly, by paying attention to what the early years were telling them. It was never the thing you were meant to have at the start.