Of Career Sucess and Personal Fulfillment: A Few Personal Reflections for Legal Scholars

Approaching my 35^th year of teaching, and passing my 67^th year of life, and with retirement not too far away, I was struck by the recent comments of Scottie Scheffler, the number one ranked golfer in the world. In a rather solemn interview, he questioned the connections between career success and happiness or internal peace. Here are some of his comments about his career:

It's fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it's not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart… That's something that I wrestle with on a daily basis…. It's like showing up at the Masters every year; it's like why do I want to win this golf tournament so badly? Why do I want to win the Open Championship so badly? I don't know because, if I win, it's going to be awesome for two minutes…. You win it, you celebrate, get to hug my family, my sister's there, it's such an amazing moment. Then it's like, OK, what are we going to eat for dinner? It feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for like a few minutes. It only lasts a few minutes. 

I also recently watched an excellent documentary about Barbara Walters, one of the most important interviewers in television history. She also seemed conflicted about the relationship between career ambition and personal happiness or fulfillment.

Without in any way suggesting that any of us can truly relate to the accomplishment of being the best in the world at anything, or being internationally famous, I do think there is more than a morsel of wisdom in these reflections relevant to legal scholars who find themselves in the national media or their work appreciated on a regular basis. At the least, it is something I have wrestled with now for years, and several senior colleagues have expressed similar concerns to me.

So please forgive the “look at me Louie” aspect of the next part, but it is relevant to what I want to suggest to legal scholars.

A few years ago, and for the first time in our 18 years of marriage, my wife and I went completely off the grid on a kayaking trip off Vancouver Island (there was a way to reach us if there was a family emergency). Not germane to this post, but I recommend this kind of adventure highly where there are no phones, no internet, and no way to access social media.

After we finished this trip, we agreed we would wait until after we drove a couple of hours until we looked at our phones over lunch. When I did, two things happened to me that were completely unexpected.

I had forgotten that months earlier I had been nominated to be a member of the American Law Institute, a prestigious organization that at the time did not have many constitutional law members because, for reasons I have been advancing for years, there is no real “law” in constitutional law. The ALI is responsible for the Restatements of Laws in many different areas (but not constitutional law). To my shock, I was accepted. The ALI recently expanded its constitutional law roster (but don’t expect a Restatement of the subject, ever). But still, it was a great honor to be accepted.

Then I noticed that my text messages had blown up because Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times, in his semi-regular “What I am Reading Column,” said he was learning a lot from both of my books and he found my legal realist perspective persuasive. Well, even though I had published a few op-eds in the Times, both on my own and with others, to have Bouie promote my work in this way in the Times created quite the internal buzz in my head, as one would expect. And the congratulations came in from far and wide.

With as much humility as I can muster, I will say that I have had other experiences like this where my work has been noticed or quoted in major national and international outlets or I’ve been interviewed in places that garnered much attention. I have also noticed that most of the time this has happened, the feeling lasted, well maybe more than the two minutes Scottie talked about, but not much more than a day or so.  And then, like any drug, the feeling wore off, and I needed, or at least wanted more. And, unlike my wonderful time with my wife, family, and good friends, there felt like something was missing, and then I started thinking about the next interview, article, podcast, or, for that matter, blog post. The buzz simply did not last.

None of this kind of success would have been possible until the internet, which is a great equalizer. In my field, in 1991 when I started, there was no real opportunity for constitutional law professors at non-elite schools like my own to become noticed because of the elitism that pervades much of the legal academy. But that has changed somewhat due to the internet. To name just a couple of many examples, scholars like Jonathan Adler and Ilya Somin can now receive the kind of attention that prior to the internet was almost exclusively reserved for folks at the top 10 ten ranked law schools.

So, I would like to make three personal observations about all of this for legal scholars whose work gains the spotlight, however defined, in the hopes a few might find them helpful.

First, if you want the attention, and I am in no way suggesting you should not want the attention, write and speak your truth, even if no one believes you. This may or may not work, but authenticity is always good and the best way to find personal satisfaction. This was my existence for the first decade of my career, and I am not at all sure the next two and a half decades gave me a whole lot more satisfaction.

Second, as Scottie said, career is not life. Really. And I don’t think I can elaborate that point better than he did.

And finally, the buzz of recognition and the joy of being heard by your peers and others is going to come and go no matter what level of attention you are seeking or you obtain. In other words, external gratification is always a moving target, coming and going, with ups and downs and then more ups and downs. I am not suggesting we should not strive for success, but I am suggesting we keep it in perspective; otherwise the in-between times can be hard. I have suffered through some of that over the last 25 years.

What I have found to be a permanently bright aspect of my career (aside from teaching) is real relationships. I have been blessed to become friends with a bunch of folks outside Atlanta whom I can honestly call good friends and who have shared my ups and downs--and I theirs.

I expect that after I retire, I will remember my students, the people I worked with, and the friendships I developed through my work much more than how many times my articles and books were discussed in the New York Times, my CNN appearances, or invitations to prestigious conferences. For younger scholars, find people you like and develop them, as friends and mentors. For the more senior of us, do the same in reverse. I am close friends with several legal scholars much younger than I am, and my good fortune in being able to help them first as a mentor and then as a friend has been so rewarding. And that feeling does not go away.

Most of us want to be noticed and appreciated, and like Scottie, we devote much of our daily life to our careers in the hopes of achieving success. But, like Scottie, not in terms of degree, of course, but in kind, professional success, however defined, can only take us so far. I think, at the very least, keeping that perspective in mind and ruminating about it from time to time can lead to a happier, more fulfilling life.

by Eric Segall