Thankful for Trials

The audio above contains the whole message. Below I have the text of the first illustration before I dive into the study of Genesis 41.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of Joe Flom, who is the last living named partner of one of the most prestigious law firms in New York. Flom grew up in a Jewish family during the depression. He did well in school and eventually got into Harvard law even though he did not have a college degree. Not only that, he graduated as one of the very top in his class. Everything was going well until it came time to search for a job. Joe had attended a good school and he had gotten good grades, as a matter of fact, he did better than many of his peers, yet he was unable to land a job at any of the major New York firms. Joe was Jewish and the big firms preferred to hire Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Joe could have given up. He could have become so upset that all his hard work was not enough to get him his dream job. Joe could have become resentful that he did everything right and due to discrimination was held back. Joe was a victim, but though he had been discriminated against by the top firms of New York, he refused to walk away from being a lawyer and instead joined a small group of men who were in a similar situation and decided to start their own firm.

This group of lawyers were dedicated, talented, and well educated, they were just from the wrong “antecedence,” the wrong race, ethnicity, religion, well, they were Jewish. In the 1950s, they turned to unglamorous areas of the law. The big companies preferred to handle legal filing and taxes for big corporate entities since this was what was considered “dignified” legal work. Other legal matters pertaining to proxy fights, litigation, and corporate takeovers were considered uncivilized, so the big firms avoided accepting cases that involved those things.

But in the latter end of the 1950s and for the next few decades corporate takeovers became more commonplace, and the only lawyers that corporate investors could get to do this work for them were lawyers like Joe Flom—lawyers with talent who had been pushed out of the major firms and were forced to take whatever work they could get. Joe and his friends had become the best in those cases. They had years of experience, and they were already very good to begin with. As big companies become more and more involved with litigation and “undignified” work the best lawyers were exactly the ones who had been kept out of the big firms.

Today, that law firm that Joe joined, Skadden, Arps, earns over $1 billion a year.

The hardships of being discriminated against and kept out of the big firms and having to do the work the big firms were not interested in doing caused Joe and others like him to become experts in what no one else wanted to do. Joe’s firm would do handle whatever cases came their way and that prepared them for what would become a very lucrative part of law practice. The hardships Joe and others like him faced were the keys to their future success.

(sources: https://www.litcharts.com/lit/outliers/chapter-5-the-three-lessons-of-joe-flom, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/outliers-the-story-of-success-by-malcolm-gladwell/, https://fosterreisz.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/outliers-the-story-of-success-%E2%80%93-the-three-lessons-of-joe-flom/ )