The 10% stretch

If you take too much pressure, it may be overwhelming, leading to stress, depression, anxiety, physical ailments. And giving up, which is the worst.

If you take it too easy, there is no growth. I am assuming here that you are interested in growth in life.

So what’s optimum for growth? Just a little beyond what you can already handle. A little bit of stretching things, till just outside your comfort zone. 

Imagine that you have gone to the river to fetch water. How much will you bring back? 

It really depends on the size of the vessel you are carrying. You cannot bring more water back than you have the capacity to carry - in a bottle, in a jar, in a mug, or in a truck/ tanker. 

It is also about how much energy or strength, or systems you have to carry the water back. If there is not enough petrol in the truck you can’t succeed in your mission. If you take a big vessel to fill water but you do not have the strength to carry it back, that’s no good.

But the point is that the first few visits hardly count. 

Whatever may be the water you bring back the first time, you can learn from your mistakes as well as success, and then the next day you can improve on your current systems to bring back even more water. And repeat.

Every time you go back, you can figure out ways to do it even better than you did the last time.

You can engage a team. You can rent a fleet of tankers. You can set up a pump and a pipeline. You can keep building a better water supply system as your resources and imagination grow.

This is how businesses are built, careers are grown and this is how practices can become incredibly successful.

Law is like the river, you can learn to carry an endless supply of water if you keep going back. But you have to stretch.

Growth is a certainty if you want to grow, and if you keep going back for more, and keep trying to grow the system. 

But the way you grow is by stretching your existing capacity, by inventing ways to make things more efficient and learning to bring in and manage more resources. 

Knowing the importance of stretching, how do we incorporate this in legal training? How do we implement this in the LawSikho courses we offer?

Every week we give you two client matters. Not real but fictitious matters, often modeled around real matters. 

It could be that you have to draft or review a contract, or prepare a plaint, or reply to a legal notice, or prepare a memo for an imaginary board of directors which has sought your advice. 

We give you 90% of the material you need - templates, how-to guides, precedents, basic study material to fully grasp the concepts involved. But 10%, we leave it up in the air, for you to research, figure out or struggle with.

It’s ok if you fail. We only want to stretch your imagination, to make you struggle intellectually so your legal muscles get stronger. We would later give you what you need to close the loop if you did not already figure out.

It is scary for some students. 

It is out of the syllabus! 

You did not teach us, how can we do this?

Just try, see what you can do, we have to patiently say.

A few weeks later, when that same level of the intellectual challenge becomes plain for the students, they look back and realize how fast and how far they have progressed!

It is a beautiful feeling. For them, I am sure, and most definitely for us.

10% stretch. Where can you apply it in your life otherwise? Share it with me. I would love to hear.