#510: Why It’s Time to Embrace Laziness, with Dr. Devon Price

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer: 

Welcome to The Lawyerist Podcast, a series of discussions with entrepreneurs and innovators about building a successful law practice in today’s challenging and constantly changing legal market. Lawyerist supports attorneys, building client-centered, and future-oriented small law firms through community, content, and coaching both online and through the Lawyerist Lab. And now from the team that brought you The Small Firm Roadmap and your podcast hosts 

 

Stephanie Everett (00:35): 

Hi, I’m Stephanie Everett. 

  

Zack Glaser (00:36): 

And I’m Zack. And this is episode 510 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today, Stephanie talks with Dr. Devon Price about their book, laziness does Not Exist. 

  

Stephanie Everett (00:48): 

Today’s podcast is brought to you by NetDocuments, and you’ll hear Zack’s conversation with those folks shortly. 

  

Zack Glaser (00:55): 

So Stephanie, we’re coming into the middle of the year, man, that’s crazy. Yeah. We’re closing in on the end of Q2, the beginning of Q3, and that gets us thinking about where should we be in our offices? What should we be thinking about at this beginning of Q3? 

  

Stephanie Everett (01:13): 

Yeah, it’s a great time to check in. If you went through the goal setting process that we recommended you do at the beginning of the year, now would be a good time to look at those goals. Maybe you were looking at ’em really intently in the first couple of months, but they’ve kind of fallen off the wayside. No judgment, right? That’s part of this. It’s okay if that’s what’s happened, it’s time to revisit them. Now’s a great chance to look at your financials because the halfway point, that math is easy. So I hope lawyers- 

  

Zack Glaser (01:44): 

We like easy math. Yeah, that’s helpful. 

  

Stephanie Everett (01:46): 

So where are you on track to hit your revenue and your profit goals? And if not, why not? That’s a good place to start. Maybe you created some other operational goals for yourself, for your business. Check in on those. Are you on pace to make those happen? Maybe you’ve actually hit your goals. We have some Labster who just blew revenue out the water, blew some profit numbers, way exceeded what they thought. And so it’s time to reset and be like, okay, let’s not sell. Let’s not back off. Let’s keep going. What are we going to do next? 

  

Zack Glaser (02:23): 

Right? Absolutely. I know when I was practicing, I always, you write down those goals, you do keep them in mind, but then when it comes time to look at them, it gets scary because you’re like, I don’t know, but I looked at some goals that I had for Q2 for here and was like, oh, I thought I was behind on them. I’m doing great. We’re hitting these things. This is awesome. So even if you’re kind of scared of them, you might get in there and be pleasantly surprised, but this is a really good time to level set and to look at those. 

  

Stephanie Everett (02:58): 

And if you find you need some help, obviously we’d love to help you with that. That’s exactly what we do inside of our lab program. I guess the other thing I’ll mention, I don’t know if you’ve already covered this on another intro and it’s duplicative, but we’re shutting our company down the week of July 4th. We just decided let’s give everybody an entire week to be unplugged and unchecked. Because even when you take vacation as a leader, you’re often tempted to check in, see if somebody needs you, 

  

Zack Glaser (03:28): 

Right? There’s that one thing that I want to kind of shepherd through and just make sure, and there there are a lot of people who are where the buck stops that listen to this program and it is really tough to turn off unless you kind of shut off the whole thing. And I think that’s really helpful. 

  

Stephanie Everett (03:47): 

Yeah, that’s what we decided to do. I was like, if the entire company is closed, nobody can feel bad if they’re not checking in. And that really kind of goes into my conversation with Dr. Price today. This whole idea of giving our minds our bodies time for rest to rejuvenate. So I mean, you’ll hear more about that in a second, but I just want to really commend everybody that before we really start jumping in and diving into the second half of the year, now is a great chance to unplug, to do that, reset, to give yourself and your team some space. So please take advantage of that and figure out what you can do to get away. 

  

Zack Glaser (04:25): 

I like it. I like it. Well, now here’s my conversation with our sponsored guest and then we’ll head into Stephanie’s conversation with Dr. Price. Hey y’all. Zack, the legal tech advisor here at Lawyerist, and today I’m talking with Michelle Spencer from NetDocuments about getting started with artificial intelligence. Michelle, thanks for being with me. 

  

Michelle Spencer (04:50): 

Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. 

  

Zack Glaser (04:52): 

So Michelle, last time we talked about getting started and security and kind of getting an idea of what’s out there, but once people have an idea of what’s going on, I guess where do they need to go and security, security, security in artificial intelligence. But once they have an idea of that, where do they need to go to get started with ai? 

  

Michelle Spencer (05:14): 

So we talked a little bit about a quote that I liked, and part of that was working really hard to solve difficult problems, and that’s what lawyers do every day for clients in their practice. So before you go out and start buying a bunch of tools at NetDocuments really like to get folks to focus in on what problems they’re trying to solve. So with generative ai, we’ve kind of broken it into three categories based on the problem and the content you need to have access to solve those problems. So the first category is client work, product and services. Second category is legal research, and then the third is general business processes and kind of the admin side of the house and it relates to the content that you need, right? 

  

Zack Glaser (06:13): 

Right. The stuff that you need to get out of this artificial intelligence piece. 

  

Michelle Spencer (06:19): 

Exactly. So for example, I wouldn’t look to legal research tools to draft letters for me, 

  

(06:29): 

Probably not. Yes, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. I also probably wouldn’t be secure if I were taking content that I have built this whole information governance framework around and oh, this vendor who hasn’t even been around six months is wanting me to upload my client documents into their system. We talked about security last time. So really if I’m looking to do client work, product and services, I want a tool that has access to the content that my precedent work product where my expertise lives and I’ve built up a body of work for my entire career. If I’m doing legal research, I don’t want to be those Avianca guys in the news. So I probably need to use a tool that has actual factual case law because we know that these systems just want to help you and they’re going to make things up. And conversely, you have general business process tools, things like Microsoft copilot. Yeah, they’ll do some of the functions that more legal specific tool would do like summaries, but they’re not going to be grounded in your documents and work product necessarily. They’re more designed if you want to improve your meetings, if you want to help with calendaring, things like that. Those tools are great for that, but really look for the tool that fits the problem and the content, 

  

Zack Glaser (08:13): 

Right? Yes. Right tool for the right job because these things have particular purposes for them. And the Avianca issue you got at is using the wrong tool, not necessarily using ai. Using AI was not the problem. It’s using the wrong tool of artificial intelligence so we can get ourselves into trouble with that. 

  

Michelle Spencer (08:34): 

Yeah, exactly. And another piece of it is kind of automation and understanding the capabilities of the tool. So I just saw a story in Bloomberg about some Lawyerist using gen AI to calculate fees. It doesn’t do math well, 

  

Zack Glaser (08:53): 

We’re not neither 

  

Michelle Spencer (08:53): 

Not there yet. And that’s where if you combine it with some of your traditional automation tools, it can do those pieces for you and then let gen AI focus on the text. 

  

Zack Glaser (09:06): 

Right, right. Well the other aspect that I like of this focus on the problem to be solved is instead of saying what artificial intelligence tool do I have out there and what can I get it to do for me? You’re saying, what are my problems? And starting from that and saying, how can I solve this? Maybe it is artificial intelligence, maybe it’s not 

  

Michelle Spencer (09:25): 

Exactly. A lot of things can be solved with just automation if people haven’t dipped their toe even in looking at workflows and processes yet, that can be a good place to start and then layer the Gen AI on top of that. 

  

Zack Glaser (09:41): 

Absolutely. And net documents certainly does a great job of all of those things. Well Michelle, thank you for giving us an introduction into focusing on the problems to be solved here for AI and gen ai. Really appreciate your time. 

  

Michelle Spencer (09:54): 

Thanks for having me. 

  

Devon Price (09:59): 

Alright. Hi, I am Dr. Devon Price. I’m a social psychologist. I’m a professor at Loyola University Chicago and I’m the author of the books Unmasking Autism, unlearning Shame, and then the one we’re going to be talking about today, which is Laziness Does Not Exist. 

  

Stephanie Everett (10:15): 

Hello, Dr. Price, it’s so great to have you on the show. And okay, I’m just going to start by telling you I struggled a little bit with the book because I feel like laziness to get started with the book I should say because in my mind I was like, one of my strengths finders is achiever. So I try to achieve something every day. When you read my strengths finder description, it says every day you start with an empty bucket and you don’t feel fulfilled until you fill it up by checking off lists and marking off task and doing all the things. And so this kind of spoke to my soul, but I struggled with it in a good way is maybe what I’m trying to say. So maybe just to kick it off, I know I just kind of did a word salad there, but I would love to hear what prompted you with your story and what kind of had you start to focus on this idea of laziness and achiever in our world? 

  

Devon Price (11:08): 

Yeah, I would say I was similar to you in that I was very achievement motivated, what you’re describing sometimes in psychology, we call it prevention focus in the sense that you’re aspiring towards things, but it’s almost to just kind of find the relief of like, okay, I have done enough rather than, oh, I’m super excited about this thing and whatever I do is going to be a great outcome. I was very much the same way. I was kind of a awkward kid who struggled socially. I didn’t know I was autistic yet. And the one area in life where things came kind of easily for me was academics. And so I really created a whole identity around the things that I was good at, the areas in which I was rewarded and tolerated and all of those things. And so then I went straight from college into graduate school without a break. 

  

(11:58): 

I finished undergrad early, I finished my PhD as quickly as I could because that again was my source of life, meaning my source of validation. I got my PhD at age 25 entering into a job market that is really tough, graduate degrees in psychology. It’s pretty hard to get a full-time professorship. And I just immediately tumbled into really catastrophic burnout. I was very physically ill for a year afterward and I couldn’t produce and work at the workload that I had always done before, once I was physically ill like that. And so it really demanded that I reorient how I think about myself and what I even wanted out of life during that year of illness. I really had to walk back away from the aspiration of being a tenure track professor and not apply to all of those jobs and work at a much slower pace. 

  

(12:52): 

And that itself was a really dramatic reorientation of how I sought myself and how I lived. So that got me thinking a lot about just views of productivity in our culture and my own views about productivity. At the same time, I was teaching at a school where I still teach now Loyola School of Continuing Professional Studies, which is all adult students who typically are dealing with a full-time job, childcare, elder care, a physical disability. They’re juggling all of these things while going to school. And that was not too different from the position I was in. I was trying to juggle work and academics and a disability at the same time. And my students were constantly telling me that they felt that they were lazy, that they were afraid I was going to judge them as an instructor for them not working hard enough or not making class their number one priority all of the time because they had other life priorities. 

  

(13:46): 

And I just saw myself reflected in that so much and it really made me want to take a step back and say, okay, what is going on here that some of the busiest, most overextended people in the world who are doing school work, childcare, all of these responsibilities, they feel lazy and I feel lazy while I’m coping with all of these things. So that’s when I really started writing about the topic and just delving into the research on productivity and just all of the really self-defeating myths that a lot of us believe about productivity, especially in America, but really it’s kind of a worldwide sickness, unfortunately. 

  

Stephanie Everett (14:20): 

Yeah, obviously in the book you talk about this concept of laziness. How do you define laziness? 

  

Devon Price (14:28): 

Yeah, so usually when people use the word laziness, there’s a degree of moral condemnation in there. Typically when people use the word lazy, they’re saying that somebody is failing to complete a task that is important to them because if you failed to complete a task that you didn’t care about, that would just be being rational. That would just be a useful allocation of your time. Not doing something in and of itself can’t itself just be lazy because we can’t do everything. We all make judgements about what’s important to us and what isn’t. So somebody not doing something that doesn’t matter to them, that’s not laziness, that might be a difference in values and what somebody prioritizes. And we might disagree with them in what they prioritize, but we can’t really say somebody’s lazy for not doing something they don’t care about. But if somebody does care about a goal, whether it’s finishing college or doing more volunteer work, whatever it is, and they’re not meeting that goal, we usually in our culture write them off as lazy. 

  

(15:26): 

But that moral condemnation, that kind of implication in the word lazy, that there’s some personal flaw that’s causing a person to disappoint, it doesn’t really make sense. And that’s really what I set out to critique in the book because if somebody is failing to meet a goal that kind of by definition we’re saying they are invested in it does matter to them clearly it’s not from a lack of motivation, that’s not the problem. It’s not a lack of valuing the goal, that’s the problem. So then there has to be something in the way, some unseen barrier to action that either we’re not recognizing or that we’re not seeing as a good enough reason to not be taking action. And so typically culturally and historically when somebody gets called lazy, they’re being told that they have some inner weakness, that they have some character flaw. But in the book and in my writing about laziness, I wanted to just really unpack why that logically makes no sense. It reflects a lack of curiosity about a person’s circumstances and what’s getting in their way or what is demanding too much energy out of them such that they can’t do something that’s important to them and how incurious it is for us to just call that laziness. 

  

Stephanie Everett (16:42): 

Yeah, it seems like you also talk about because of that societal view, we adopt that maybe unknowingly. And so then there’s this idea of what we achieve and our work ethic really starts to define our sense of worth. That really hit me. And so I wonder if you could explore that a little bit more too. 

  

Devon Price (17:04): 

Yeah, it’s really embedded in our culture. All of the narratives that we consume from the times we’re little kids to just in mass media, it’s all very individualistic stories about a singular hero who works very hard with very little support, overcomes all odds and does something very impressive. The way we teach children is to train them for a future career. That’s how we present learning rather than here are the skills you need to survive in life and form relationships and have a life that’s balanced. It’s all about how are you going to earn money, how are you going to be of use to somebody else who’s going to profit off of you? And that’s how your future is going to be defined. That’s just what gets taught to us and how the educational system is set up. And all of these cultural forces really leave us in a place where achievement is everything. 

  

(17:55): 

And it also is our economic reality under capitalism too. Even if you want to be more accepting of yourself in all of your flaws and limitations, or even if you want to raise a kid and not have that kid be super focused on achievement and being impressive all of the time, it’s hard to not worry about how am I or how is my kid going to make enough money to survive? Most of us live in a very precarious financial position or we feel that we’re just one or two paychecks from being unhoused or a medical catastrophe or something like that. And so both are a lot of really deep seated cultural reasons, social programming that makes us really insecure about not doing enough that makes us very achievement obsessed. But it also is the case that a lot of people who are really achievement obsessed, it’s not a personal neurosis either. 

  

(18:52): 

It’s a pretty accurate stock of just what living today in our economic system looks like. And so it makes sense unfortunately that people are just giving themselves ulcers and just working themselves to illness all of the time because unfortunately for a lot of people, it really is the economic reality that you take every gig that you can get because you don’t know what’s on the horizon if there’s going to be another client, if there’s going to be an economic downturn. And so that means it becomes very, very hard to not just unlearn this stuff, but also to actually get into a secure enough position where you’re not overworking yourself all the time. 

  

Stephanie Everett (19:28): 

Yeah, no, that resonates a lot. For those who want to start this process of rethinking laziness, how do you tell them to even get started? Because it is so ingrained in us, and I know you obviously go at length in the book about this, but what would you tell people who are curious to learn more? 

  

Devon Price (19:49): 

So the book has all kinds of different exercises for unpacking this stuff on different levels. I think what I’ve found is it is harder for someone to give themselves grace first, then it is to extend a little bit more grace to someone else. So I think that’s often a really good place to start is to look to the people in your life or in your community that you might internally kind of disparage as lazy. So for a lot of us, we’ve been taught all our lives to view homeless people as lazy. There’s a lot of narratives about people just need to get a job, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and I think a lot of us recognize how irrational that is, how hard it actually is to get oneself out of that situation. But we still probably have a lot of those messages lurking in our brain. 

  

(20:38): 

We probably still sometimes have reactions to people that we need to unpack. So one of the first places that I tell people to start is just as simple as give an unhoused person in your community money with no strings attached and just trust them to know their life circumstances best and to act as if a person’s life is worth sustaining, even if they are never going to be productive. So that can extend to elders in your life, to disabled people in your life to how we think about children. Most of us at most stages of our life are not going to be productive. It’s really only a few years out of our lives that we’re productive in the capitalist sense. And so human life has to be worth more than just generating revenue, generating some impressive result, and it can be really hard to internalize that for yourself. 

  

(21:31): 

So I think the best place to start with that is doing more to really just love on and be in support of people who are not currently productive and who might not ever be. And if you can start to extend some of that grace to other people, I think then it starts to get a lot easier to say, okay, maybe it’s okay if I have a day where I don’t get any work done, or maybe it’s okay if I actually do nurse my illnesses, let myself take time off or even come to a point of acceptance with the fact that I’m going to get older and I’m going to slow down. There are going to be things I won’t be able to do forever and my life can still have meaning without it being shaped by just my output. 

  

Stephanie Everett (22:16): 

And yet so hard. I mean, it can be mean even in your story when you were physically sick, it was tough to stop and give yourself that space and time your body needed to heal. And I think we probably see that most often. I’ve even heard there’s maybe some movement to change the idea of the perfect attendance award at school because it’s like, why are we teaching kids that they should show up to school sick to get a piece of paper at the end of the year? Maybe that shouldn’t be what we are trying to get people to do. 

  

Devon Price (22:49): 

When you really think about it, that award is an award for suppressing your own feelings. If you’re giving that award, you’re saying you did such a good job not telling anybody you were sick when you were sick, which is especially perverse in an era after Covid has changed everything about that. It’s telling kids and adults too, if you’re depressed, if you had a loss, if something happened that was difficult, if your family wanted to go on vacation, whatever it is, none of those things are legitimate reasons to take time off, and it’s virtuous for you to push through any other element of your life beyond showing up to school. And we do that with the workplace as well, and it’s pretty twisted. And yeah, my own story was definitely one of, I finished graduate school and I had this terrible fever every single night for nine months, and part of the reason it didn’t get better at first was because I was still walking five miles a going into work every day doing side hustles. I would cram all this work into the few hours of the day that I didn’t feel sick, and then I would wonder why I was so exhausted and shivering every night and in doing this work, I’ve encountered so many people like that, people who have just been writing work emails while they’re in labor. 

  

Stephanie Everett (24:06): 

Yeah, guilty have done that. Yeah. 

  

Devon Price (24:09): 

Yeah, it’s so intense. 

  

Stephanie Everett (24:12): 

It is. And so counterproductive is what you also explore in the book. It’s that when you try to push through, as you’re saying, when you do this work, your creativity goes down, your ability to problem solve goes down. We know the research tells us we can’t work at the same pace or state, what’s the right word for that? We would if we were giving ourselves the space and the time we need it for rest and for recovery, 

  

Devon Price (24:40): 

And I think we all know this intuitively. I think we all feel that point in the day where we’re so tired that we can tell the caliber of the work we’re doing is not as good. It’s harder to focus. We’re cranky, we’re making mistakes, we’re kind of cutting corners to get through something or our eyes are just like a blur and we can’t look at the computer screen. We know our bodies know that things are breaking down, but we argue with it. We tell ourselves that it should not be that way, that we should be able to work more, that we should just willpower our way through it, and it’s really non-negotiable, and we do see that in research that for decades, industrial organizational psychologists have been trying to find ways and managers have tried to find ways to squeeze a little bit more productivity out of people, just a couple more hours of them being at their A game and it never works because we’re animals. We need to rest and eat and get some sunshine and talk to other people and cuddle with our kids or our dogs on the couch. We need all of those things for those couple of hours of us bringing our A game. 

  

Stephanie Everett (25:46): 

Yeah. One of the things you said in the book that was probably my biggest takeaway was this idea of you say instead of hunting achievements start to savor moments and experiences, and I found that to be so insightful and also hard to do. Like I told you, I’m achievement driven, but I was like, okay, how can I just even stop and enjoy dinner instead of just rushing to have dinner with my family? I’m always on to my kid like, can you just slow down and take, we’re supposed to be enjoying this meal and savory our food instead of rushing through it. I know that’s a silly example, but that’s kind of what I’ve been focused on here lately. 

  

Devon Price (26:24): 

It’s so real though. We are so detached from our bodies and our physical real and what we’re actually doing that’s right in front of us. There’s so many times that I have a meal that I don’t even remember whether I liked it or not because I was eating it in front of the computer as just a means to an end so that I don’t die at the computer so that I can keep grading these papers or whatever. It’s so twisted because that’s one of the greatest daily pleasures of life is just nourishing your body, savoring, even preparing food. That’s something that I’ve certainly started to work on, is just actually enjoying the sensory experience of the sizzling in the pan and the smell of the herbs. It is really important for us to be connected to our bodies so that we can tell when we’re getting sick and can tell when we need something, but also just for its own sake, being alive can be a great thing. It doesn’t have to all be panic and rushing from one deadline to another. And I think unfortunately, us workaholics, we get really detached from all that’s happening around us in our bodies sometimes. 

  

Stephanie Everett (27:30): 

Yeah. I so appreciate too, jumping back to your story that you recognized this was happening and you realized you had to make some decisions to change your path, and so you said, okay, maybe I won’t go for a tenured professorship and position. And that really struck me because I know a lot of people in our audience, they’re very career-driven and what’s that next thing? And yet I continue to hear as we work with lawyers and they call me and they’ll say, I probably make enough money. I just want to enjoy life a little bit. Enough is enough, and I think we have a hard time sometimes thinking about and defining enough what is enough, and maybe that’s what you were speaking to even earlier, this drive that we have of always that next thing and it’s really reshifting those priorities around, I have enough and now I need to enjoy myself and be with my family and do these things that are important to me. 

  

Devon Price (28:27): 

And it’s really a practice because if you are a workaholic or if you have been living at that really punishing pace, when you do slow down at first you’re going to feel really jittery and anxious, maybe even a little depressed. You might feel like, what is the point of life if I don’t have this goal that I know I can kind of single-mindedly put my focus on? And so it’s a skill you really have to practice of appreciating what’s around you, asking yourself what really matters to you. That’s another really big exercise in the book that if work isn’t the center of your life, what do you care about in your community, in your family, in the world that you could put some more time toward if you wanted your life to be a little bit more in alignment? It’s not all about just sitting around staring at the wall or taking naps, even though those are things that are also great, and I think a lot of us, sometimes we need a few weeks of just really just napping and resting and recuperating from years of hard work, but after you start to repair a little bit, then you have the energy to be creative and to volunteer, to do political work, to learn some skill that you’ve never had the chance to learn before because you can’t really justify it because it’s not going to make money. 

  

(29:41): 

There’s just a whole universe that opens up to you in how you can live when you unplug from this stuff. And I think when you’re on a really narrow career path, you’re often comparing yourself to what other people are doing. You’re living at the financial lifestyle that other people in your field are living at, which can be very expensive and time consuming, and so you have to really unplug from that and see other ways of living and imagine those other ways of living for yourself, and there’s really just unlimited potential once you actually decide, okay, I get to decide what the rules for my life are, rather than just having this rule of I need to get X, Y, z done every single day, 

  

Stephanie Everett (30:19): 

I’m going to let that sink in for everybody. I think it was important, this idea of deciding what the rules for your life will be, and in the book, I know you share so many stories, but real stories of people who have shifted those rules for them and they made big decisions, but it allowed them to open up and do these other things. I think I’m remembering a story about someone they moved to a different state, right? Because the cost of living would be less, and it allowed them to work a different job and have different family responsibilities. And I think in the moment those feel like really, really hard decisions, but then afterwards probably everyone’s like, oh, that was so easy. I just moved. 

  

Devon Price (31:00): 

Yeah, there are a lot of sacrifices we make that are actually so freeing. A lot of my work around autism, I talk to a lot of fellow disabled people, and a lot of us have this moment of realizing, oh, a full-time job is not in the cards for me. It’s too physically draining or a job where I have to be in the office all the time. I cannot do it. I can’t dress the way they need me to dress. I can’t do the water cooler conversation, and it’s very scary to take the plunge off of that path because there’s a script for how adult life is supposed to look. But once you decide to throw out that script, I know people who they pool childcare with other families in their neighborhoods, or they live in a communal kind of situation with multiple different members of their family or friends and they live at a completely different pace than other people, or they have more of a nomadic kind of lifestyle where they have a really small ecological footprint and they spend relatively very little money, but the whole country is their oyster and they get to have a lot of adventure and visiting friends all across the country with a very small imprint on the world and relatively few possessions, and those are just some examples. 

  

(32:10): 

A lot of people, it is things like, I’m just going to freelance or I’m just going to reduce my cost of living in some way, or I’m going to make peace with my parents looking at me like I’m a failure because I know that I’m kind of setting the terms for success, and success for me is maintaining my health and maintaining my relationships. It’s a scary adjustment, but there’s just so many things we can get neurotic about and beat ourselves up for that are worth asking ourselves Who said this was a rule? Do I have to actually live my life by this? Do I need to have a clean home, perfectly pristine, clean Instagram friendly home? Do I need to wear a full face of makeup every day? Do I need to have this impressive achievement? Whatever it is, there’s so many things that drain our time that are about keeping up appearances that maybe we don’t need to do. 

  

Stephanie Everett (32:58): 

Yes. I just so appreciate that you have started this conversation for us. I mean, I think it’s one probably a lot of people are already engaged in, but certainly the book gave me different things to think about. Like I said, I think I just struggled to conceptually at the start, I don’t want to discourage anyone from reading it because once I got into it, it all made sense, but it was just kind of that initial me pushing through what I see myself do in my life. My team will tell you that I tend to be a little bit of a workaholic, but then it was so great and so many, you just have a really cool perspective. I just want to share that and appreciate you’re just like, yeah, why do we do this? I love that you keep using that word twisted too. I think it’s refreshing, so thank you for your work and for being with me today. 

  

Devon Price (33:46): 

Yeah, thank you and thanks for reading it. There’s no greater compliment to an author when somebody tries to really engage with the work, even if they have some initial questions or hesitance or they just bring their own perspective to bear on the work. That means the person’s reading it deeply, which that’s exactly what you want when you’re trying to make a creative work, is to have somebody bring themselves to it as well. So thank you so much. 

  

Stephanie Everett (34:10): 

Yeah, we’ll put a link to the book to all your works in our show notes, and it was great having you with me today. Thank you. 

  

Devon Price (34:16): 

Yeah, thanks for having me. 

 

 

Announcer: 

The Lawyerist Podcast is edited by Britany Felix. Are you ready to implement the ideas we discuss here into your practice? Wondering what to do next? Here are your first two steps. First. If you haven’t read The Small Firm Roadmap yet, grab the first chapter for free at Lawyerist.com/book. Looking for help beyond the book? Let’s chat about whether our coaching communities, are right for you. Head to Lawyerist.com/community/lab to schedule a 10-minute call with our team to learn more. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not endorsed by Legal Talk Network. Nothing said in this podcast is legal advice for you. 

 

 

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