My Mexican Lawyer

There’s lots to do.  More than is possible in a day.  I look at this list and think, how is it going to be possible to get all this done during the day and then I end up Facebooking (or Google+ing lateley). And this is a condensed list…

To do:

1. Exercise.

   This is the number one thing that I don’t get done. I know I should. I have never read a book on business, success or marketing that says “Don’t worry about it, be undisciplined, let yourself turn into a fat tub of goo while you sit in front of a computer screen 8 hours out of the day. You deserve it.”

   As I was getting ready to go back to school in 2008, I wasn’t yet married and didn’t have all same responsibilities that I have today. I exercised an hour or two a day, six days a week, doing something I loved. I weighed 185lbs and looked really good. More importantly I felt really good.

   I got married, started school, had a kid (well, not me personally) and started planning my empire: I now weigh 223. That seems to be the magic number, it doesn’t change either way anymore.

   Putting this in the blog is more for me than for anyone else. I know what I have to do, but maybe by publishing it here I will be shamed into following through with this (I think I heard somewhere that shaming yourself into exercise is bad). Where can I get time for exercise? Its something I try to start up every few months, I get it done for a week or so, but then I lose steam. We’ll see.

2. Meditate.

   This is another one that I should do and maybe someday I will get it down. Who wants to spend 20 minutes thinking about nothing? That’s the thing, I do.

   I know that mediation is good for me: I have seen studies, I have listened to testimonials and I have even tried the practice myself. It works, it makes me more serene. So I just need to take the time to kick off my shoes, sit down on the floor and focus on my mantra.

3. Be a dad.

   I am a big fan of my son. I would say that this is thing that I am absolutely best at right now. I can honestly say that I do it pretty well, which is something that I am proud of. It is the most important thing that I have going on in my life.

   A big part of this is trying to read to my son. He’s not even a year old yet, he doesn’t have much of an attention span and I don’t know if he understands the language yet, so this is not an easy task. Most of reading is less decoding the words on the page and more trying to make sure he doesn’t put the pages in his mouth or crawl away. I learned to love to read because my mother read to me from a very early age and my parents owned a bookstore where I spent my formative years. I want my children to have that love of reading.

4. Continue to court my wife.

   I was hesitant to put this on a blog. How cheesy right? Except, I have to remember to do it. She isn’t just the person that lives in the same house with me and watches my children, she is my partner and I rely on her for support. It is only fair that I keep the spark alive.

   How is this important for my professional life? Lets be realistic: do I want to be defined by my profession and my job and what I do to make money? Not completely, I want to have a job or a profession that makes me insanely happy but I also want to make money and do my job(s) so that I can afford a life that I can share with the people I love and who support and love me. Its all connected.

5. Read the newspaper.

   I watch the news. I get news updates on my smartphone, I sometimes even read them. I have a habit of skimming the Mexican Govt. bulletin, the “Diario Official”, every morning to make sure no new laws slip by me. I have a subscription to the Mexico City newspaper “La Jornada” delivered to my Kindle every day and the local paper delivered to the office. I want to read the paper because I need to stay up to date on current events.

   I end up doing other things. There are too many other things to do to read the paper, right? I like the Kindle version because it really lends itself to browsing, I can browse over the content and only read the things that I find important. I should do it more.

6. Blog more.

   In my quest to engage in more personal branding, I am really trying to write more on this blog. I love writing, I have been reading a book by Jonathan Fields that talks about “flow” and getting lost in something you are passionate about. I get lost in blogging when I am able to sit down and do it.

7. Learn more.

   I shared in a previous post how I have been in this intense learning more phase of my life. It has become some sort of an addiction, I often feel this insane need to be learning more combined with an overwhelming feeling that there is just so much I don’t know. The internet and the interconnectedness of the world these days creates an environment where I can easily wander off from topic I am currently reading and engage in something only minorly related.

8. Brand Building.

   Apparently, I am a brand. I have been hearing this for a long time, but it is starting to sink in…or maybe I am at the stage of my life when I want to hear it. Still, brand building often is harder for me to justify than actual work that pays money…its all about perspective I guess. So how am I building my brand?

   1. Curating content.

      I have been instructed by one of my mentors to publish more links to other people’s content than to my own. A 10-to-1 ratio was suggested: for every time I tweet/share/g+ a link of my own I should be publishing 10 links to other people. This is hard, but it serves a double purpose of reading a lot of different material.

   2. Getting it out there.

      I printed up some business cards with my picture on one side and a mini-resume on the other. I pass them out in Wal-mart when I see a frustrated Gringo. I invite prominent local business owners to coffee so that I can tell them about my services and try to convince them that they and their clients/friends/family needs my help. I try to attend local social events and charity functions so that I am seen and heard by others. I even shamelessly promote myself on local BBS’s in an attempt to gain notarity. Its working, but it takes work.

9. Work.

   Somewhere in there i have to spend time doing work that actually pays the bills, because blogging and schmoozing isn’t doing it, yet. This currently means doing building administration and immigration paperwork, neither of which is a bad gig, but I’m not passionate about it.

   I see these guys like Eric Ward and John Jantsch and wonder what they did for money before their niche businesses took off. Work takes up a lot of time I could be doing other more important things.

10. Everything else.

    Here’s the thing: there is always something else. There is something I am forgetting. I know that when I planned this post in my head, there was a lot more to it, but I think I’ve said enough. I already have over 1300 words.

No wonder I am exhausted all the time, I keep trying to do all of this. Today, I sifted through the newspaper, I meditated, I exercised, I spent the morning with my son, I posted a link to something cool on twitter, and I am blogging too much…I better buy my wife some flowers on the way home from the office today. Now I have to work.

An interesting thing happens when you start to focus your life on getting educated and becoming a professional. After a while you spend most of your time with people who have also focused their lives on getting smarter and being educated, and this rubs off on you. Throughout the first couple of years of getting my law degree many of the teachers would sort of prod us about reading the newspaper daily and reading extra-curricular materials to broaden the scope of our educations and I always sort of felt that I they were crazy because I was SO busy reading the required texts, reading laws, etc. that I really didn’t have time for any extra reading. I have on and off for the last few years tried to make a habit of reading the newspaper, but the most consistent I have been able to be is reading the index of the “Diario Oficial de la Federación“, the daily paper put out by the Mexican government that publishes important changes in laws and other important topics for the legal environment in Mexico.

…But I have kept trying. This Spring, I got a Kindle, which I justified by saying that it was going to be useful because I could load it with Mexican laws and therefore not have to carry as many books with me for all my classes. This was true, it’s loaded with laws and my backpack is markedly lighter than it was last winter. That’s great. The Kindle ended up serving another function as well: I have quick and easy access to books that I might want to read. It is somewhat addictive being able to research, browse and purchase limitless amounts of information at the moment I think “Oh, I’d like to read a book about X”. On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with the habit of opening the Kindle and reading about Economics while waiting in line at the bank or Immigration (we are talking dozens of hours a week), instead of Facebooking on my smart phone.

So where am I going with all this? We’ll get to that.

One of the classes I took in the last term of school before I started my break for my internship ended up being “personal growth” class where we spent most of the term reading self-help books. At the time (and sometimes at present as well), I complained a lot about having to take a self-help class where we sat in a classroom, lit candles, held hands and talked about our feelings. Somehow, I managed to gleam a jewel from the exorcism (a nickname given by my classmates): We read 7 Habits of A Highly Effective Person, where I found the phrase “Sharpen the saw.”

So, I started my internship and while I am supposed to be working on a monograph on Condominium Law as sort of a mini-thesis to finish my degree, I have found myself with a lot of spare time for learning different stuff. It’s been good. I feel that between being in a law office 8 hours a day and generally trying to learn more on my own, I have learned more in the last few months than I have in the previous years of University. Sad, huh? Probably not.

In the beginning of October I got the opportunity to go to Mexico City to take a course from one of the (if not THE) best business schools in Latin America, titled “Finance for Attorneys” (actually Finanzas para abogados, but you get the idea). I found myself in the company of attorneys, mostly from Mexico City, who were all around my age but with a decade’s head start on their legal careers. Most had their master’s degrees in corporate or fiscal law and occupied impressive posts in multinational companies that we all know. I felt humbled. The professor was a charismatic speaker and an expert in international finance. During the first weekend of the class I felt seriously out of my league, I finally adjusted and by last weekend I was at ease…I learned a lot, but I think the most important thing I got out of it is something that has been being drilled into me for the last few years of university:

Lawyers need to know a little bit about everything, in order to put the law into context.

That’s fine, but how does that work? This was something that the Finance professor broke down nicely. For a well rounded education, we need to have a basic grasp of the following:

1. Accounting – Understanding money;
2. Economics – Efficient use of scarce resources;
3. Finance – How to make money work;
4. Management – How to be an effective leader;
5. Marketing – Putting it out there.

So, in my quest to get better I have been throwing effort at each of these topics little by little. They are interconnected in such a complex way that I’ll have to talk about that in another post. Basically, I learn more and it only serves to make me realize how little I know.

So I’m a work in progress…but I’m getting better.