There’s no such thing as a shortcut. There’s only tough-as-nails resilience.

I’ve sat down several times this month to write up the career framework I keep promising I’ll write. After all, it would be shared vis-a-vis an illumination of my legal tech career path from analyst to executive. But there’s something that’s been needling at me during this process. I’ve gone through some massive changes, like leaving Netflix, moving with my wife back home to New York City, setting up my new studio, and considering my next move. And right now, I have this massive gift: time. I get to weigh in on peers’ projects just as they leap to the next level. I have time to have aimless conversations without a metric attached — especially with people I mentor. We can get into broad, wide-ranging conversations about what they want and how to get there.

As much as I love these conversations, there’s still that needling thought: More often than not, people are looking for shortcuts to build their careers. I get it. We all want to fast forward through the hard part. But I end up telling people the hard truth: There are no shortcuts. There’s nothing but hard work, failure, discomfort, and waiting. 

To be completely honest with you, reaching the level I reached — the level where I felt comfortable, capable, and like I was making a major impact — didn’t happen overnight. It took years.

There’s something I don’t share widely, because — quite honestly — I’m tired of responding to the shock on peoples’ faces. But here’s the truth about me: I don’t come from money. I don’t come from generations of highly educated people or a family with tech industry connections. My entire family are blue collar New Yorkers. I didn’t have any shortcuts, even if I might have wished for them when I was starting out.

Moving into the tech industry without a playbook meant I had to fail over and over and get back up. I had to dedicate years to learning and be absolutely relentless about it. I had to ask for help — even if it felt humbling. (I wasn’t born with a cool haircut and the ability to give keynote speeches at major conferences or command multi-million dollar budgets.) 

But my untraditional background gave me something invaluable: resilience. I had to be scrappy and move mountains with a shoestring budget. I had to come up with off-the-wall ideas, because I didn’t know any other way. I had to show up every damn day. And because I didn’t have a clear path laid out for me, I simply had to be resilient. There was no other option. And it’s just about the best skill any of us can have when we’re chasing success, let alone transforming a legal industry. 

Years in and proud of what I’ve built, I still need to dig deep into my resilience. I still sometimes feel imposter syndrome when I enter a room full of senior executives. I sometimes assume that they had a secret knowledge I didn’t — or still don’t. Here I am in a white collar world without a playbook. I have to write the playbook as I go. But put another way: I get to write the playbook. And my ability to get back up keeps propelling me. It even propelled me to train myself to connect with people from a huge swath of life experiences. I’ve been obsessed with learning their stories, and it’s just about the fastest way out of imposter syndrome that exists. Ultimately, most of us had to work our asses off. Most of us have vulnerabilities and something to overcome. We’re a lot more alike than we think.

In this period, I’ve been able to reflect on my last ten years in legal tech. I’ve remembered the massive transformations I went through and hurdles I cleared, even if I fell the first five or ten times. It’s clear that there were absolutely no shortcuts. 

But I also learned that my untraditional background and my need to write my own playbook combined into a superpower. 

Resilience is that superpower. You just can’t knock me down. 

In my next blog, I’m going to talk about developing resilience — step by step.