Welcome to Osgoode. You’ve made it. Congratulations! Over the past few years, you’ve worked to earn stellar grades, experienced the blissful joy of writing the LSAT, and spent countless hours thinking about your wonderful self as you prepared your personal statement. Reality check. You’re smart and sharp. So is everyone else. And now, you’ll be graded on a curve in a school where everyone wants an A. You’re all used to being the top dogs of your respective high schools and undergrads: the “smart kids”. It may get ugly. People will become secretive, competitive, and insecure. Rest assured, most of this will pass and you’ll return from Winter break to a group of civil individuals.
In many ways, law school is a test of emotional endurance that is quickly revealed to be a transformative process: a before and after. Law school is about failure, but the silver lining lies in your perspective of failure. We often see the ghost of failure as the norm; as we measure our defeats rather than the victories we can achieve, as we focus on arbitrary measurements such as the grades of others, and as we simply want to survive each final and move on. We forget why we wanted to practice law in the first place. We entered law school with the aspiration of helping people or serving our country as a public servant, but these motivations gradually die out as the notions of a naïve idealist. However, it is up to you to discover how to motivate yourself in life, and as a law student, to embrace failure as simply a thing to improve upon, work hard, and have some fun at the same time with those around you. Be the spirited 1L who viewed law as a way to help people and come out on top, regardless of rank or perceived superiority of others.
It’s supposed to be hard. No matter where you live, no matter your career, or what opportunities are presented or handed to you, success is tough no matter how you slice it. But in the end, success is inherently difficult and that is what makes it so rewarding. Consider the NBA. Less than 1 in 75 (or 1.3 percent) of NCAA senior players get drafted by an NBA team. Yet, we don’t judge college basketball programs as a failure for producing only a handful of professional players. Being a professional athlete and succeeding in law school is supposed to be hard. The first step in creating success is to realize this. Stay persistent. Big goals are not easy to achieve. No matter how you slice it, they take time and consume massive amounts of energy. Small actions every single day without fail will move you closer and closer to your goals, whatever they might be. Failure is not the opposite of success. It is part of it.