In January of this year, I celebrated the 35th anniversary of opening my law practice. I started my law practice in 1983, when I was 25 years old. I was able to find an office and generate business by following the advice that was given in the book, How To Open Up Your Own Law Practice Without Missing A Meal.
The phone call woke me up in the middle of the night. The exact time was 2:57 a.m. The voice on the other end was from a man I had represented on a previous occasion. For the purpose of this article, I’m going to call him “Jake.” When I answered the phone, the first thing I heard was, “Hey Harry. This is Jake. Before I tell you why I’m calling, do you need time to clear your head?” He paused and then said, “Are you alert enough to have a conversation with me?” “Yea, Jake. What’s going on?”
During the 1970s, when I was in high school and then college, there were three popular family singing groups in America: the Partridge Family, the Osmonds, and the Jackson Five. The Partridge Family had a weekly TV show that aired from 1970 to 1974, and two of the Osmond siblings, Donny and Marie, had a weekly TV show that aired from 1976 to 1979. Both shows provided clean, wholesome family entertainment.
If you could choose a superpower that only you would possess, what would it be? Would it be the ability to fly like Superman? Or would you choose the ability to travel through time like Dr. Strange, or to live forever like Peter Pan? There’s one superpower that I think would be of great benefit to me in my dealings with other people on both a personal and business level.
Last week, I wrote about the importance of practicing healthy paranoia. The definition of “paranoia” is “a tendency on the part of an individual or group toward excessive or irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of others.” My definition of “healthy paranoia” is “the intentional practice on the part of a person to be reasonably and rationally suspicious and distrustful of people who the person is not intimately familiar with, so the person can guard against unanticipated surprises and dangers.”