Reflecting on my life at 40: Meandering Thoughts

The last page held the ring. Well, the ring slipped through the tissue paper I had rested it on. So when she turned to that page it was just the tissue paper.

She said, “What’s this? am I supposed to cry?”

Fortunately I tied the ring to the back of the book so it hadn’t fallen out. I fished it out from behind the tissue paper and everything went swimmingly after that.

Spoiler alert: she said yes.

We have been committed to each other now for going on 18 years [Math check: 40 yrs – 22 yrs = 18]. Yes, 18 years this year.

Marrying Catherine has been a fantastic decision for me.

I’m sure she would say the same thing about her decision to marry me (I just checked, so we’re good).

I do feel like I probably oversold her on how rich I was going to be in the future, at least so far.

She says that’s not true and that I shouldn’t say things like that.

I agree with her. So other than posting that on the internet for strangers to see, I never say it.

Now we have 6 kids!

In accordance with the life program previously mentioned, my wife and I started having children right away. I had my daughter when I was 23.

We have 6 kids now. Our oldest is 16 and youngest is 3. We have three girls and three boys (and a cat, and, as of this last Christmas, a hamster).

As for my kids, even though I am choosing to post about my own life on the internet, I’m not going to be posting too much about the kids individually. While I can choose, probably poorly, to post about myself online, I’m not going to make that choice for my kids. When they turn 18 (and buy their own phone plans), they can decide how much of their life they want to share to strangers online.

It should probably be 0.

I don’t even know exactly why I’m doing this. I guess there is just something cathartic in sharing about your life. Maybe its a hope that something I have to say or share might somehow make a difference.

And by “difference” I mean a “positive difference.”

And by “positive difference” I mean “personal validation.”

And by “personal validation” I mean “some kind of affiliate or advertising income.”

I jest…

But, yes, I have six kids.

For the most part, it’s great having six kids. It is also very loud and at times very messy.

And when I say “very loud” and “very messy” what I really mean is “expensive!” So please click on every ad or link you see on this website!

All joking aside, being a dad comes with the full range of emotions. I never experienced the anger and frustration that makes it feel like my blood is boiling inside me before I had children. On the flip side, some of my life’s most enjoyable moments have been with my kids.

Being a father is challenging but also fun and rewarding all at the same time.

But also I wasn’t joking about it being seriously expensive, so that’s a good segue to careers.

College & Career

I feel like one overarching theme of my life is that I’ve never really known what the heck I want to do with it (other than be a reliable husband and father).

My mom is from the Philippines and she would say she is an Asian tiger-mom. I joke that I was taught that you could either be a doctor, a lawyer, or a failure. My mom never actually said that, but I like to say that she did.

As a kid, I did not think a lot about what I wanted to do as a career; at least not in specific terms. I envisioned that I would be some sort of successful businessman. I didn’t know what that meant exactly. The picture in my mind was George Banks, from Father of the Bride. He’s a business owner, a nice if not quirky guy, with a nice family.

I just didn’t know what that picture meant specifically. These were all just vague ideas floating around in my mind.

Should I be a doctor?

When I was in high school, I considered being a doctor. I took AP biology but didn’t love it (I passed the AP test for college credit though). My chemistry teacher wouldn’t let me take the AP class because she said I broke too many beakers. Oops. Also, a lot of people I knew who were doctors said not to do it for various reasons.

I didn’t do it — primarily because I just wasn’t particularly interested in it.

I assumed I would get it all figured out in college.

Going to College.

In college, I didn’t figure it out. I had no idea what I wanted to major in. I chose economics for two reasons: (1) it had the fewest amount of required credits, and (2) I thought it sounded pretty smart.

I did okay in econ. It was a fine program and I found most of it interesting. I didn’t love it though. It was obvious to me that there was a certain type of student that seemed to really thrive in economics. I can’t really describe it, but I was not that type. I’ll just say that I was blown away with how smart some of the people in the program were.

After teaching a difficult concept, one of the professors would always ask, “Can any of you articulate your confusion?”

I never could.

What I could do, was go to the TA for help figuring out the homework every time, memorize enough questions to do okay on the exams, and then relearn how to do multivariable calculus every semester. Seriously. I felt like I would completely forget how to do a total differential after a two-week Christmas break.

Even as I write this, I don’t actually remember what a total differential is. I just know I had to relearn it each semester.

I didn’t find my one true “passion” in college.

I didn’t love economics and, really, I was only okay at it. If you were to look at my college transcripts, I did great in classes that weren’t economics and only okay in economics classes (but my worst grades were in religion classes–maybe I’ll talk more about how much I hated those classes later). I graduated with a 3.55 GPA. At the time I was very ashamed of it, but now I don’t understand why I felt that way.

My favorite classes were tennis, river rafting, and Chinese. I loved the Chinese class. The only reason I took it was because I had the credit hours available and thought it could be interesting. I enjoyed learning the language and I especially enjoyed writing the characters. I was good at too. I finished with something like a 98.5% in the class.

Towards the end of the semester, the department chair asked me if I would consider switching my major to Chinese. I gave it a lot of thought. It would have added a year to my schooling and I already had a baby. I felt like I needed to get out of school and start making money as soon as possible. So I declined.

In retrospect, not taking that professor up on switching is my biggest college “what if.” One extra year of school is nothing in my current view. Plus (spoiler alert), I went on to do more school anyway.

As the end of college drew closer, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had toyed around with the idea of entrepreneurship. I went to some preliminary startup competition events. My ideas didn’t get any traction though. My favorite idea was a line of business socks that were normal on the top, but party on the bottom. Above the shoe would just be normal socks, but below the shoe would be comfortable cotton in all sorts of wacky colors and patterns. When you wear them you snicker to yourself thinking, “I’m complying with your expectations, but I’m also not really.”

My next favorite idea was a food website that was all about how to make foods from your favorite restaurants. It would be a copycat recipe site that would sell books, kitchen gadgets, etc. (If anyone knows how to copycat the Taco Bell bean & cheese burrito, send me the recipe now!)

To make a short story shorter, I didn’t go anywhere with these ideas.

I considered getting jobs in the healthcare administration space, but nothing was panning out. In hindsight, I probably just didn’t cast a wide enough net. At the time, I didn’t quite know what to do.

Again in hindsight, and this is embarrassing to say, I probably only applied to maybe a dozen jobs. I think this is mostly because I was afraid to move on. The paradigm I was following had nothing after school was over. I think I was afraid to move on to what was next — whatever that was.

Law School it is then.

Fortunately, there is an old Chinese proverb that applies to such a situation:

Following the wisdom of these fine sages, I took the LSAT, did fine, and went to law school (BYU).

I went into school gung ho. I wanted to work hard and be the best student I could be. I thought if I applied myself a little more with no distractions and no total differentials, I could surely come out at the top of the class.

This was also right at the beginning of the housing crash and the job market was getting tight. As such, I felt it was particularly important that I do my best.

I had envisioned that I could be some bigwig at one of those fancy NY law firms and then I would move to some amazing company where I would eventually become some sort of head honcho.

I worked as hard as I knew how to work during that first semester. And you can probably see where this is going…

My grades ended up being mediocre…pretty much exactly mediocre. The median GPA was 3.3 and my first semester GPA was 3.32. So all my hard work made me exactly average (I get that median and average are not the same thing).

This was the first time in my life where I actually fell into depression. It was very weird. I knew I was depressed but I didn’t know what to do about it.

There were a lot of other things that happened in law school that made me think I had made a serious mistake by doing it. I’m not going to recount those right now because, frankly, it’s depressing.

Law school a very depressing time and I just couldn’t get out of feeling like a big failure.

Life as a Lawyer.

Being a lawyer has been fine. I felt like a fish out of water for the first five years. I just felt like I had no clue what I was doing. I could do specific research and writing assignments, but I didn’t get the big picture and didn’t really know how to work a file.

I went to lunch with a more seasoned attorney once and told her that I was thinking I needed to get out of the law. She told me to hang in there because “every attorney feels a bit lost for the the first five years.” She said that things will click for me and that I would be fine. I’m going to use her name because she was always very awesome to me: Maria Nutile in Vegas.

She was right.

It just takes a while to gain enough experience to get a solid understanding of how all the rules of civil procedure work and how to use those rules strategically. Once you unlock that understanding, you can play the legal game of chess with anyone.

My favorite thing about law is that every case is like trying to solve a puzzle. It’s just about uncovering all the pieces and putting them back together to unveil the hidden picture.

Probably 4-5 years out of school, I felt like law was something I could do. Otherwise, this song has it right:

The Business and Practice of Law.

Practicing law and being a good business person are not the same thing. After being in the law for a number of years, I felt like I had a very good grasp of practicing law.

But being able to practice law doesn’t necessarily translate into being able to bring in clients or especially clients with the ability to pay.

One of the most frustrating aspect of law (other than when judges disagree with you) is that the people I would want to do work for can’t afford $250+/hr for legal services.

I initially wanted to help people who were starting small businesses. I wasn’t able to get traction there. I tried to promote by developing a podcast, which I called “Small Business Stories.” The podcast was an interview format where small business owners shared how they got started, overcame challenges, and found success. I tried to have business owners from small businesses you might find around town. I didn’t want to just recycle the same personalities that you see on almost every business podcast.

I loved most things about that podcast. I definitely loved having a creative outlet. I liked sharing my voice online. And I really appreciated each of my guests and each one of them had interesting stories to share.

The podcast had good listenership (5000+ downloads per month) and even made a “New and Noteworthy” selection by the people at iTunes.

But it didn’t translate into business. And even though I had a lot of people downloading, I couldn’t ever get anyone to do anything. I had decent traffic on the website, but no one would subscribe to my email list or bite on any of the ads I ran.

As a result, I ended up having to dump it because it just took too much time with no return. Instead, I kept doing the line of work my firm already had — which was defending insurance companies in relation to construction surety bond claims.

I enjoyed this line of work (once I learned how to be a lawyer), and it was interesting enough, but it wasn’t the mark I hoped to leave on the world.

Moving to the Farm.

When my wife and I were engaged and newlyweds, we would play this game “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” Both of us had this pipe dream of raising our family in a small farm-like area where the kids could run around, get dirty, and learn to work hard. Coming on 10 years of marriage and four kids later, we were in the suburbs of Vegas with that vision nowhere in sight.

So we looked into making a change.

The short version of the story is that we sold our house in the Vegas area and moved to Southeast Idaho. We bought a 100-year-old farmhouse with just under 5 acres of land.

We loved the space and the kids were able to run around. We ended up with a bunch of cats (outside cats). Deer wandered around. We had some turtles in a pond. It was idyllic in a lot of ways.

On the other hand, it turns out that taking care of 5 acres of land and a 100-year-old farmhouse requires a lot of work and a lot of money. It was also somewhat isolating. But the straw that broke the camel’s back for me was that roots kept blocking our septic system and our well went out. I didn’t have the knowledge or time to fix things like this. We did get them fixed, but it was very expensive.

A year and a half into our farmhouse adventure, we decided that we missed being on city sewer and city water and headed back to the suburbs.

After looking at several options, we decided that we wanted to stay in Southeast Idaho and see if I could start my own practice from the ground up.

Hanging my own shingle.

I started my practice in October 2017.

As a long-time wannabe entrepreneur, I was both excited and nervous. It was something that I had thought about before in a daydreamy way (that’s probably starting to sound familiar to you).

I thought I would take another shot at helping out the small business community. I resurrected Small Business Stories for a while. This time I was touting trademark services. Trademark services are based on federal law so my theory was that I could help with trademarks for any business across the nation.

Meanwhile, I began networking with other attorneys in the area.

One of the random areas of law I knew about was auto fraud. In Vegas, I defended insurers who issued DMV license bonds to car dealers. License bonds are a statutorily mandated form of consumer protection. As part of the licensing requirements, dealers agree that they will not engage in fraudulent activity and must purchase a bond to back the promise. Basically, it means that if a dealer acts unlawfully against a consumer, a consumer can make a claim on the bond to recovery damages. Attorneys take these cases because most statutes require the dealer (and the bond) to pay attorney’s fees to a successful claimant.

You can read an article I wrote about how auto cases work in the Idaho Bar journal, the Advocate, “Navigating Your First Used Car Case.”

I found that no one was doing consumer rights cases in Idaho and a lot of attorneys had referrals for those types of cases. I sent out one letter to attorneys registered with the local court and two weeks later I had five pretty strong cases.

The cases kept coming in so I kept taking them. Eventually I created a website specifically for consumers in Idaho: IdahoConsumerLaw.com. As of today, if you google “Idaho Lemon Law” my website is the first hit (after the Idaho attorney general’s office).

You can read an article I wrote about hanging your own shingle in the Advocate, “Hanging Your Own Shingle as a New Lawyer.”

I litigated against big corporations like GM, Walmart, LG, and others. I never felt like I was in over my head (well, except for once when I tried to help a bunch of students pro bono with pandemic housing issues at BYU-Idaho — that was quite shocking and I may post more about that in the future).

I had a standing free phone clinic every other week for those unable to afford counsel through the Idaho Volunteer Lawyers’ Program. To toot my own horn, I was given a Bar award for this:

I know you are supposed to say that these types of awards aren’t a big deal, but I appreciate it very much. I didn’t expect it and wasn’t do it for an award, but it feels validating to be noticed. Plus, now I can say that I’m an award-winning attorney (and I didn’t have to pay for the award!).

Midlife crisis, burnout, and starting a new chapter.

Hanging your own shingle is stressful. The most stressful parts for me were twofold: (1) I had to succeed in the case to be paid, and while I could control my own effort in a case, I could not control the judge, and (2) I had to manage literally everything.

I’m not sure which one of these two was more stressful.

I had more and more cases coming in. This is both good and bad. It’s good because you need cases to make money. It’s bad because you never know if a case is going to be a long or short one. You can sometimes get overloaded.

And by “sometimes” I mean “all of the time.”

You just end up getting stretched too thin. I can’t solve all of my client’s problems, manage the business, and solve my own personal issues at the same time.

I went to a plaintiff’s bar conference a couple years ago. A judge I respected very much (because he tended to agree with me on cases) was giving the keynote address. He talked about how being a plaintiff’s lawyer is a very stressful job. He then pulled out some research that showed that the stress attorneys carry can reduce their life expectancy by as many as 10 years! His point was that we needed to focus on our own health and not fall into substance abuse.

I regretfully had not been very good about focusing on my personal health–physical or mental. Even through I got into a rhythm where I wasn’t working as many hours as my first couple of years, I would still worry and think about the practice literally all of the time. So I was already aware that I was not doing amazingly in the mental or physical health arena.

But hearing about the practical impact that might have on me in terms of years was jarring. I was not wanting to lead some crusade in exchange for years of my life. All I was trying to do, really, was make a living for my family. I thought it would be more meaningful if I could help people along the way while doing it.

On my drive home, I knew that I needed to try to make changes.

I had so much going on at the office that I needed to either hire or take fewer cases. I didn’t necessarily want to take fewer cases because I needed them to keep coming. But I also didn’t want to hire. I was making good money for myself, but not enough where I wanted to pay someone else.

I did end up hiring some help but that’s a story for another day (and also really not that interesting).

After doing some soul-searching, I realized that I didn’t want to commit myself to a lifetime of litigation. The truth is, I didn’t like suing people. Many of the business owners I would sue were run by decent people who just made a mistake. These were Idahoans who were trying to make a living for their families just like I was. They would fall into the trap of sending my demand to their neighbor or friend who is an attorney. That attorney tries to act all tough and then it devolves from there. In the end, they wish they would have resolved the issue at the beginning (which is what all my letters say, but why would they listen to me?). Candidly, I think a lot of people got terrible advice from their attorneys in these situations. So I felt bad for them.

My point is that I didn’t see myself doing this for the rest of my career.

Due to this, coupled with my concerns about my own mental and physical health, I decided to see if I could sell my practice.

And I did sell it — mostly just for the value of the website traffic.

I’m happy that I did my own practice. I learned a lot of great lessons and it was a great experience. But I’m also happy that I was able to close that chapter of my life.

Life after solo practice.

While I was finalizing the sale, I was also trying to decide what to do next. I toyed with the idea of getting into coding — web design and things of that nature. I also thought about going back to school for something, maybe an MBA. But I detested the idea of going back into school debt.

While I was considering my future, I joined Idaho Legal Aid where I handled housing cases for people of limited means. That was a great job and hands-down my absolute favorite job as a lawyer up to that point. I enjoyed the people I worked with and really enjoyed being able to litigate cases where my own interests weren’t tied up with the results of the case (and I only lost one case, and that was because my client didn’t show up). I loved going home and not taking baggage with me. I enjoyed having worry-free weekends and holiday breaks.

My wife eventually told me that she felt like I had turned into a grumpy person while I was doing my own practice. She said that after I closed my practice I started going back to my old self, which is not that cranky of a person, in case you didn’t know.

While I enjoyed Legal Aid, the pay was not that great. And for better or worse, we had a lot of expenses to cover. In fact, I was supplementing my income from leftover funds from my practice. Obviously, that is unsustainable. I thought I could do it for a year or two until I decided what to do next.

But I wasn’t stressing about it too much. I was just enjoying a small reprieve.

New job, new city.

I was talking to my dad one day about my plans, or maybe lack thereof at the time. He suggested that I should look back at the surety industry.

I thought that was a great idea.

If you’ve never heard of surety, it is basically an underground economy. Many industries have surety bonds involved in the background. Surety bonds are insurance-backed guarantees that someone will or will not do something. I already mentioned DMV bonds. Those bonds guarantee that a dealer will not engage in fraudulent conduct.

As another example, construction bonds guarantee the owner of a project that a contractor will perform the construction and will also pay all their laborers and suppliers. This ensures that the owner doesn’t get stuck with a half-completed building or with a bunch of liens against their property.

As I thought about it, I remembered that most of the surety clients seemed like great, easy-going people who were not overly stressed out. Many of them commented about how lucky they were to find their jobs.

So I started looking at former clients for job prospects. And I’m now employed with one of them!

In taking my current job, I moved my family from Southeast Idaho to the Seattle area, where we now live next to a little lake. We call it, fittingly, the “Lakehouse.”

The Present Day.

As I type this, I’m here at the Lakehouse in a corner of my bedroom closet that I turned into a makeshift office. It’s been a long, hard road to get here. We’ve had a lot of ups and downs. But thankfully we’ve avoided any serious issues with injury or disease, etc.

From where I sit today, I feel mostly grateful. I’m first grateful for my wife who has stuck with me and helped me all along the way. She’s the most mentally solid and enduring person I know.

I’m grateful for my parents. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them. That’s in both a literal and practical sense.

I’m grateful for the friendships I’ve had along the way. There are many people that I haven’t spoken with for years who I still think about from time to time. They have been an important part of my life even though they probably wouldn’t know it.

I don’t know where this Fickle Father project will take me. I hope that it will be something that will bring more fulfillment into my life and maybe even someone else’s. If it does, I’m dedicating that fulfillment to all the people I have in mind when I’m putting this post together.

If you think that might include you because we’ve connected in the past, you’re probably right. Also feel free to reach out to me to double-check (or to explain why I need therapy): drifter @ ficklefather.com.

If you want to follow along, do it!