"We talk about 'game-changers' as if there were a fixed game," Mark Matousek to attorneys in hard times

It's now out of the closet, even in optimistic America, that the worse the suffering, the better it could be for our careers.  Yeah, adversity as competitive advantage.  We can probably thank Steve Jobs for that and his 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish." 

Since the legal industry is experiencing unusually hard times after a heady five years, I scouted up award-winning author Mark Matousek for this exclusive interview. 

An expat from Andy Warhol's Factory and INTERVIEW MAGAZINE, Matousek fled fame, fortune [relative], and all the sex he had time for to figure out what good suffering might be.  The latest result of that is his 2008 book "When You're Falling, Dive." He writes for both serious and pop publications.

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MARK MATOUSEK, Exclusive interview on adversity as opportunity:

JG: You contend, "Terror is fuel; wounding is power." There are certainly lots of terrified attorneys with six-figure debt and if they already lost their jobs and can't get a new one they're among the walking wounded.  Can you give them hope?

MM:  More than that, Jane.  See, the upside of fear is that it forces us to be creative and to get the courage to seek out what's underneath the fear.  Ironically, sometimes we're afraid of losing things like jobs, a title, a level of compensation, not because we want them but because we don't really want them at all. 

Losing then becomes a kind of checkmate: Our previous whatever state will reverse course and head in a different direction. [I bet this is Steve Jobs's tale]. Eventually, as the mystical saying goes: All will be revealed.  Along the way, energy is freed up.  And the former lawyer who was struggling just to hang in there is a star, in the legal profession or in some other line of work.

JG: Is the legal profession encountering more game-changers or Black Swans [Nassim Taleb's term] than ever before?

MM: We talk about game-changers as if there were a fixed game - that is, a guaranteed set of plays, a pre-ordained number of innings, losses, fouls and home runs. This is fiction.

This game we're actually playing has its own field and own rules. Change is embedded into its nature. We suffer more than necessary because we want or need to imagine that the game is fixed.  When attorneys accept this, they're likely to exploit whatever comes as the raw opportunity it is.  [Read about the silver lining in Wall Street's meltdown for attorneys]

JG:  In "When You're Falling, Dive," you assert there's "something stronger than fear."  We all need to hear more about that.

MM: Jane, it's simple: Fear calls forth its opposite.  That propels us forward as long as we don't let it shut us down. In my book I describe a woman going through the worst of her life.  She tells us about going through Manhattan and seeing green blades of grass growing through the asphalt.  She gets it that strength is something very different from what she had imagined.  She came to define it as a mystical force of endurance.

JG: Life, professional and personal, you say delivers "red-flag moments."  Ignore them and we can wind up stuck at best, dead at worst.

MM: "Red-flag moments" are those epiphanies which warn us to pay attention.  Because they're intense we are willing to drop the everyday blinders of our profession and our belief system.  Those are the times we can shift gears most easily and change.

JG:  I was interested that you discuss "survivor art."  After all attorneys have been through during these last six months or so, they might be itching to organize their experience in an artistic manner.

MM:  Think about it: All art is survivor art. Survival is all about facing the unknown, having faith as Michelangelo did, that there is a figure in the stone, that we can make meaning of our suffering and victories. Most artists feel like outlaws.  That is a feeling we can all benefit by capturing.

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Mark Matousek also wrote "Sex Death Enlightenment: A True Story," "The Boy He Left Behind: A Man's Search for His Lost Father," "Dialogues with a Modern Mystic," and "Still Here."  The latter was a book he helped ghostwrite for Ram Dass.