A Harvard Law student explains why she's skipping the competitive law track to focus on meeting people and exploring experiences like traveling to Africa. Ramit Sethi connects her approach to his framework for automating what matters and actually enjoying your life.
You're going to law school. You're going to Harvard in a couple months. And you mentioned to me something pretty interesting about law school. Now, first of all, let me say that I have a lot of friends from Stanford who went to law school. And almost universally they go there. They end up getting caught up in the rat race where you're studying like 18 hours a day. They're miserable, especially as 1Ls their first year. And it's almost inevitable. Almost everybody did it. But you told me something I found fascinating, which was you have some goals before you get into law school. So tell me about those goals.
Yeah, well, right off the bat I know I don't. Or at least I'm pretty sure I.
Don'T want to do anything that's super competitive. I don't want to go into corporate law.
Wait, wait, wait. You're going to Harvard and you want. You don't want to be competitive?
I don't think the careers.
I don't think my future life involves a really highly competitive career.
Okay.
At least not in the sense that most law schools would. Most law school students would envision that. In the sense that I don't want.
To go into corporate law and I don't think I want to clerk for.
A Supreme Court judge.
So aside from that, Harvard doesn't do grades anymore.
They dropped them last year. It's a high honors pass, low pass system.
And, you know, I definitely want to.
Get out of there with my degree because I think it'll be useful to whatever I do decide I want to go into.
But it might not actually be the most critical thing that I get straight.
High passes in all my classes.
What I want to do is I.
Want to meet interesting people, both my peers and interesting professors that have done things that I think are cool.
Because I really don't know exactly what.
I want to do. I've ruled out some things and I.
Want to go to Africa because I've never been to Africa.
Africa seems is a place I would like to experience. And so rather than spending 18 hours.
In the library, I'm going to focus on doing those things. Not that I don't want to learn.
I actually am one of the few people that will probably enjoy law school because I think that the theory behind all this stuff and the history behind it is actually really interesting.
But I don't want to be miserable.
Because I just don't think there's any point in being miserable when life has been as good to me as it has.
I love that it sounds like to relate it to. I Will Teach youh Be Rich. You've got sort of an intellectual framework, right, for me and my readers. It's our system that I talk about in chapter five of the book, where, you know, your money's getting automated and you're focusing on doing the things you love while cutting costs. And you've got, you know, these three or four goals. If you hit just those, you're gonna be happy in law school. Right?
Right.
Yeah, I love that.
