The Magician

On envy, identity, and the question that leaving doesn't answer.

I have always loved magic.

I spent countless weekends as a kid at a place called “Browser’s Den of Magic”. It was a magic shop - but also a hang out - for kids and mostly older men who needed a place to hone their craft, talk shop, and maybe, escape their houses.

The place was run by an older fellow - Len Cooper.

Len would sit there, with his cigar, and do tricks. No matter which trick you asked to see, he’d perform it, make you wonder, and then put it away.

It was a good sales tactic. I bought a lot of tricks.

The tricks I was most interested in were those that you don’t want to figure it out. The kind where the whole point is to surrender to the impossibility of what you’re seeing.

Sometime around 2015, I stumbled onto a show called “Fool Us” on YouTube.

The famed magicians, Penn and Teller, effectively invite other magicians onto their stage at the Rio in Las Vegas to show their best stuff and try to fool Penn and Teller, who have an encyclopaedic knowledge of magic and illusion..

And so, most don’t fool them.

In the second season of the show, I caught a video of an act by a man named Jared Kopf.

Somewhere in the middle of his act, he mentioned that his mother had been disappointed when he went to law school.

I laughed. And then I felt something I didn’t have a name for yet.

In 2015 I was practicing law. I was about 4 years into building my practice and my firm. I was doing fairly well for that stage of the game. I was my own boss, had a good list of clients, was breaking into the film and television business in a meaningful way.

And yet.

There was something about watching Jared Kopf perform that I couldn’t quite shake. It wasn’t the magic exactly - although he really was so good. It was something in how he moved. How he talked about what he did. The complete absence of ambivalence.

He wasn’t performing a role. He was being one.

And, so, I did what I usually did when I watched someone do and be something that I was so envious of - I went back to work.

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That’s what we do, isn’t it?

We feel something inconvenient, and we file it. We tell ourselves it’s not practical, or not realistic, or not the right time. We tell ourselves we’ll come back to it.

Sometimes we do. And, sometimes - most of the time, I think - we don’t.

Anyway - time progressed and the years between 2015 and today filled up. Work. Marriage. Kids. A home. COVID. Stuff.

In that period, I had many other moments like the Jared Kopf one — standing in an artist’s studio watching and envying what the painter was doing and how he was living; watching people move completely carefree at Burning Man; feeling something stir at other performances and not always knowing what to do with it.

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Last week, my wife and I were lucky enough to get tickets to an intimate magic performance.

Jared Kopf was performing.

I didn’t plan it that way — in fact, it was entirely coincidental.

I hadn’t thought about him in years. And then there he was, in a small room, maybe thirty people, close enough that you could see his hands.

He looked different. Long beard. Dressed like someone who had fully committed to the identity of storyteller, wizard, magician. He had aged — in the way that people age when they are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing. Settled into himself. Comfortable in a way that has nothing to do with comfort.

And he was extraordinary.

Not just the magic — although the magic was extraordinary. It was the stories. The way he held the room. The way he talked about what he did with the kind of passion that you can’t perform and you can’t fake. He wasn’t doing a job. He wasn’t playing a role.

He had become something.

And I realized in that moment - this is the guy from 2015!

And I was having the same feeling I had felt in 2015, watching him on a screen.

But it was different this time.

It had shifted from envy into something closer to awe.

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And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

Now - in 2015, the envy was sharp because I was watching someone have something I wanted and couldn’t let myself reach for. The gap between who I was and who I wanted to be was wide, and I didn’t know how to cross it.

But, this time, the gap was smaller. Not closed - I don’t think it ever fully closes. But smaller.

And that’s when I understood something about the question that had been following me around for so many years.

The question was never really “should I leave law?”

That’s the surface question. The one that feels dangerous to ask out loud because of what the answer might mean.

The real question underneath it is harder. It’s: who are you, and are you actually becoming that person?

That question doesn’t get answered by leaving. I know, because I left. The question came with me.

It gets answered by doing the work of figuring out what you actually value, what you actually want, and whether the life you’re living is moving toward that or away from it.

Sometimes that work leads you out of law. Sometimes it leads you deeper into it — but differently, on your own terms, in a way that actually fits.

Jared Kopf left law. Or maybe he never really arrived.

But what I saw in that room wasn’t a man who had escaped something.

It was a man who had become something.

That’s the whole game.

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If you have thought about leaving your profession once, that’s probably just a bad week.

If you have thought about it a hundred times — if it has started to affect how you show up at work, how you are in your relationships, how you feel about yourself — that is not a bad week. That is information.

And sometimes, the information is: it’s time to go.

I want to be honest about that because most people who do what I do won’t be. They have an incentive to keep you in the chair. I don’t. If leaving is the right answer for you, it’s the right answer. Jared Kopf left. I left. Some of the people I admire most left. There is no shame in it and there is nothing to be afraid of.

But here’s what I’ve learned — from my own experience and from working with lawyers who have been sitting with this question for years:

Leaving law does not answer the question underneath the question.

It doesn’t tell you who you are when the role is gone. It doesn’t resolve the identity that got built around the work. It doesn’t clarify what you actually value or what you actually want. It doesn’t teach you how to measure your worth by something other than your output.

Those things require a different kind of work. And that work is available to you whether you stay or go.

That’s what coaching actually does. Not help you decide whether to leave — that’s your decision, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What it does is help you get clear enough on who you are and what you want that the decision — whatever it is — comes from somewhere real.

The lawyers I work with who leave law after our work together leave differently than the ones who left in a panic. And the ones who stay, stay differently too. More deliberately. More on their own terms.

The question is never really about law and it is always about you.

So here’s what I’d ask you to sit with:

Who have you felt that feeling about recently? Not the passing kind — the kind that stays. The kind that shows up more than once. The kind that has gotten heavier over the years.

What is it pointing at?

You don’t have to blow up your life to find out. But you do have to be willing to ask the question honestly.

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