Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Advice for My Younger Self | Karla McGrath | TEDxQueensU

I'm a lawyer and a teacher I've been a lawyer for a very long time and being a teacher is an excellent privilege that I now get to it I now get to add to my career I was thinking about this theme that we have for the day this theme of Uncharted and trying to come up with things that come from my career that I can bring to this audience which I know that the audience is for the most part young people and so I came up with a thought of advice for my younger self and this was intended originally as professional advice but as I went along I came to realize that aspects of this advice applied to all portions of my life and hopefully portions as well of yours I boiled it down to three things those three things are to be wrong to fail more and to dumb it down a little so lesson number one be wrong the great thing about being wrong is that you're not always wrong the fact that a lot of people agree with you does not make you right and the fact that a lot of people disagree with you certainly does not make you wrong when I was 19 years old I worked in a federal government office it was my first big job my first real job after a series of Joe jobs and I was freshly out of university and dozens of people worked in this office and it a lot of people smoked people walked up the hallway smoking a cigarette people were coming to your office and for a meeting and light up a cigarette staff meeting same sort of thing and I kept this big ashtray at my desk I had a high-traffic spot and I had a large glass ashtray with concentric circles the young people here your parents would remember this ashtray and often times it was overflowing with cigarette butts there really thought much of it one day at lunch friend of mine one of my co-workers announces to us that she had joined an anti smokers Lobby anti-smoking lobby she was joining a non-smokers rights group and the purpose of this group and the purpose of this Lobby was to lobby the government to ban smoking in government offices what you can't do that what are people supposed to do go outside every time they want to have a cigarette well what about the winter it's auto-off for God's sake and besides what are they gonna do every single time the government will shut down I look at us now Ontario you can't even smoke outdoors in a public park okay I was as a lawyer I got to go I had to go through and enjoy going through a process called articling it's sort of an apprenticeship and you get linked to a senior lawyer who mentors youth for a year before you do your exams and hopefully pass them and then you're called to the bar and I was lucky enough to article under a principle as they're called who was a smart and funny and very kind man and and I'm not only saying those things because he remains one of my dearest friends and always buys the beer when we get together and he sent me off to court one day on some errand and so while I was there I was privy to a conversation about a lawyer who asserted himself or offered himself as having been unbeaten court unbeaten in court how terribly impressive I when I got back to the office I went to my principal and I was telling him about this conversation and he barely even looked up from the page that he was reading from and he just said man doesn't sound like a very good lawyer to me um but wait what and he explained to me that whether you consider the courtroom a sports field or a battleground you know this adversarial process the one thing about a courtroom is that you can choose whether or not to fight and that in his view a lawyer who has who was unbeaten in court was far less likely to be demonstrating some exceptional skill and far more likely to be choosing his or her battles very carefully brings me to my next point fail more seemed like a nice group and I'm going to tell you guys a story that my mother and my children hadn't heard it's the story of the greatest failure of my life I was fifteen years old and I went to a garage with some friends of mine where some teenagers were playing in a band and they were doing another one bites the dust by Queen the band was doing a reasonably good job of it but the lead singer was mangling the lyrics and I know this because at that time I was the queen of Queen so he's mangling the lyrics I'm hanging back and finally I lean over to a friend of mine and I say hey he's singing it wrong and she responds hey Carla says you're not doing it right and this lead singer quite graciously and without any challenge said why don't you come up here and sing it for us that was it that was the moment that day the greatest failure of my life not because they sang it poorly it's because I said no I had sung that song hundreds of times I knew that song inside and out and I couldn't do it fear of failure in front of a half-dozen teenagers was so powerful for me that I missed this opportunity can you imagine how much cooler my high school experience would have been if I'd been singing in a bed so fast-forward 15 years I've now graduated high school not having sung in any bands I'd like to point out I've graduated from University and from law school we're done the articling I'm called to the bar and now a fully fledged lawyer my mother and father very proud I go off to court one day and I'm the duty council and the duty council is a very fun I think an exciting kind of thing to do as the duty council you're the lawyer for people who are there who can't afford to have lawyers of their own but they're also they don't make their income is not low enough to qualify them for legal aid so it's it can be like an emergency room of legal problems a great learning ground kind of stressful sometimes but quite fun I'm doing this job as I said as a fully-fledged lawyer I'm running this day and there wasn't supposed to be much going on and this young man comes to me and he has a very difficult problem he has an urgent need to move excuse me to move to the western end of the province with his three children and the difficulty is that he's no longer in a relationship with the mother of these three Joe so she as you can imagine at a serious objection to him making this move he was there that day after a series of other appearances to which I had not been had not been apart he was there that day to ask the court's permission for him to be able to move away with his three children it's a very complex problem in the law and family law we call this a mobility issue and in today's transient society this is quite a serious matter and it comes up quite frequently and here he was he wants me to go in and argue this thing for him and trying to explain to him this is really complex this is really difficult you really didn't why I didn't think he should go forward with a greenhorn counsel who just met him meant minutes before and he explained to me it's like this he says if we do it and we fail kids and I are stuck living here if we don't do it the kids and I are stuck living here so I don't really see the difference and he leaned into me he looked me right square in the eye and he said I got a really good feeling about you I did not have a really good feeling about me but I did have my instructions and so it was time to suit up now many of you will know that lawyers we get to wear these quite neat outfits I had to have a nice elegant black weskit some people call it a waistcoat they're wrong white tab collar Ted white tabs coming down here and the wingtip collar and the white tabs and this black gown that has these nice squared off shoulders and is very long you know gives you a real sense of authority purpose responsibilities well I didn't have mine with me that day because nothing was supposed to be going on and so here I was going forward my first day of court are my first time to be arguing a motion in front of the court and I didn't even have my gear I go searching through the courthouse I found some that had been left behind this person was much shorter than me but there you have it I'm standing in front of the court with my borrowed gowns ready to go down in a ball of flames and we prevailed he got to move I was wrong to have tried to talk him out of it he was right to push me forward and I have carried that young man and his story throughout my career as a litigator so how do we do it what do we do to let go of our fear of every little failure at some point failure stop becoming something that was on its way to your success and it started becoming an outcome all of its own how do we let go of that when you're swimming upstream when people are considering you wrong how do you let go of that that's lesson number three dumb it down start by focusing on what's really important I mean really important and then just you push the rest of the stuff away right and then think about yourself the way others think of you now bear with me on this one because people say oh whatever the people think about you that doesn't matter and what other people say about you that doesn't matter and that's ridiculous we are social beings we are connected and through so a little so many myriad types of connections throughout our lives what other people think of us does matter but what I want you to do especially professionally but I think this applies personally is to stop overthinking how much they're thinking about you you know that noise in your head all the time you know the bills you've got to pay and the papers that are due and what this happened and so on they have the same noise in their head they've only got so much time to spend it worrying about you and whether or not you messed up once or twice and certainly they're not worried about whether or not you gain ten pounds hey so think about yourself in the big picture think about yourself in the long haul allow yourself those failures and use them to build on to success and as for swimming upstream take a minute and consider whether or not you're being a leader whether you're being the person who's effecting change in the world which brings me to my work fairly briefly um I am running a legal clinic we just started this legal clinic a year ago we got the university got some funding from legal aid Ontario and handed this responsibility over to me um it's an innovative it's an innovative clinic we're doing things very differently we're doing things differently than they are doing them anywhere throughout the province with regard to this type of legal clinic so in terms of being wrong I'm okay with that because we're doing more we're doing it with less money and we're really making a lot of tremendous change I'm doing this with two dozen law students some of them volunteers some of them credit students what an amazing bunch of people and what an amazing way to spend the second half of my career and being wrong in that context I mean lawyers lawyers are very traditional Bunch hey they have very much they're very focused on on how things have been and they take change very slowly I'm taking change really quickly so failures I started the thing with eight students in a wheelie briefcase and you can imagine that building this project from scratch we had tremendous a tremendous number of small failures particularly failures of process their focus always being the students learning and our focus always our main focus always being the clients receiving service low-income clients dealing with access to justice issues in Family Court of all places as for dumbing it down the truth of it is I didn't really give a lot of thought to whether or not me doing it differently mattered to anybody else and this was not a deliberate choice I'm inviting you to dumb things down fairly deliberately I've apparently acquired it as a habit I moved forward I did this I did what was right and what would work and what would be effective and would make change and by the time I found out that I was big that there was pushback it was too late I was too far down the pike I pretended like I knew that all along so I guess we could sum it up another way to say just worry less do more and trust the path that unfolds in front of you as you do that and so now especially for the young people in the audience my invitation to you is to go and you tell your mom's and your dad's and your grandparents that you went to Queen's University one of the foremost educational institutions and all of the english-speaking world and a really smart lady there with three degrees told you that you need to be wrong fail more and dumb it down thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 41,526

Rating: 4.7885461 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Canada, Life

Id: Xx41zhxQ2jY

Length: 15min 37sec (937 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 29 2016