THE ISSUES
Back Away fromthe Highlighter The Neuropsychological Reason Why You’re Panicked, Tired and Still Working
BY MATT CURNOW1
I Introduction For smart people, lawyers are incredibly stupid, my housemate once said to me.2 I was mortally offended at the time: I believe my response may have been that a Masters in Remote Sensing is very nice, but that applications for a career with McDonalds were fierce, and that he shouldn’t be disheartened if he was unsuccessful the first time. Looking back at our exchange, and with the wisdom garnered from 3 years in law school what I think he was actually expressing in his crude, simple way, was concern. Specifically, our tendency to measure everything by the pursuit of grades. Too often law students measure their lives, self-worth and future by a series of arbitrary letter grades handed-down from on high. The H1’s we rationalise, sort the wheat from the chaff. They become the barometer by which every aspect of our lives is gauged – our efforts are either vindicated by their achievement, or deemed not enough when we shamefully miss out.
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As Rick so aptly put, for smart people it is lunacy to fail to see the progress we make towards our overall hopes and dreams for the sake of staring at those god-awful bloody letters. But we do it anyway; we seem to consistently distil a career, relationships and the achievement of happiness to how close or far we sit from ‘H1’; ergo, stupidity. So, when we look at it objectively; perhaps the least contemplated, but most important question underlying Rick’s truth is: why? It is a question that lawyers rarely ask themselves, assured in the certainty that the system is infallible, that competition is good and that success is its own reward. This article proposes a novel angle on that question: what if there is something underpinning this behaviour? What if the patterns we observe time and time again in law students, and later in lawyers can be explained at a biological or psychological level? I hypothesise that the reason we ignore the ‘why’ and constantly push ourselves towards that H1 is a form of ritualisation of reward seeking behaviour, akin to what psychological literature has taken