A Valuable Skill

“All of a sudden the things that the old-line law firms didn’t want to do – hostile takeovers and litigation – were the things that every law firm wanted to do. And who was the expert in these two suddenly critical areas of law? The once marginal, second-tier law firms started by the people who couldn’t get the job at the downtown firms ten and fifteen years earlier.”

The world is constantly changing, and those who are the most prepared are going to be the same people who are successful when it happens. In this case, all the lawyers who weren’t good enough for the big law firms, started their own law firms and worked on things the others didn’t want to do. When the business industry changed course, the law firms who were handling the unwanted leftovers from before, automatically were ahead of the game. One man’s junk is another man’s treasure - In this case, that junk that the first man did not want, happened to be a gold mine when the opportunity to use it became valuable. The lawyers that had been working at the law firm for years had actually been perfecting a skill that would create future opportunity for them, and they weren’t even aware that it would one day be valuable – no one was. The theory that opportunity at a specific time, to hard working people (who are not looking for it), seems to be reoccurring throughout the book. We see it in computer programmers such as Bill Gates and Bill Joy; both of them went into an obscure field without any major success in mind.