FRESH EYES

A young one was in a game of Truth or Dare with an old one and the young one asked the old one a Truth question 'If you could do anything with me what would you do? The old one replied 'I would take out your eyes and place them in my head and use them to see the world'. The young one replied 'how awful' to which the old one replied 'I would give anything to see the world through your eyes being as young as you are, being able to see the world with fresh eyes.

In a field as solid as law which is filled with knowledgeable, rational, heavy weight types, it has to be said. The limits of what you can do or achieve are defined by your mind.

This is not mindbending or voodoo and neither is it unscientific claptrap. It is reality as validated by human experience and what we see everyday.
For example, the local Nigerian economy is said to be tough and such and such cannot be done yet Chinese and Indian Nationals flood into the country and within few years are living well.
This just underscores the need to bring a fresh pair of eyes to look at your law firm's current reality because you reason and feel and think with your experiences and knowledge and the way you see the world.
Everyone does this so whenever some chap who is outside your field of expertise or knowledge makes a comment or observation, it would be better if you thought it through before shutting it down.
Now do not even pretend that this is not difficult or that you embrace this idea fully. You have your ego to contend with and if you flippantly dismiss that reason, you have your years at the bar under your belt and if you push that to the side in this case then you have your years of success and failures which have been ingrained into your memory.

Now the usual excuses will be how can an outsider tell me about how to move my business forward? Have you ever had the experience of looking for something and found that the harder you searched the more difficult it seemed to locate it and then what do you do? You put in more intense effort and go through everything again. It is at this point that you ought to pause a minute take a step back and just casually look over the entire area and then surprisingly the missing item just comes into your field of vision. Right in front of you, just there.

This is what a fresh pair of eyes offers. It is human nature to celebrate the already successful and point it out as a model to embrace but it is more difficult to point this out when the would be successful is testing and failing forward. Just like the Apple company is celebrated as innovating across music, movies, computers, merchandising etc where it did not belong.
The single thread of connection for Apple is technology and Apple thinks it can do it better. That's all. No lengthy talk about this is my industry or not.

The reason we have mirrors is so we can have a vague idea of what we look like but even this benefit is reduced by looking at the mirror for so long that we see what is in our heads not what is in the mirror. Scientific fact.
So keep this in mind when next you are feeling overly protective of the final authority of legal and what should or should not be done.