Chapter 18

Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

I was now faced with a major decision of whether to stop practising law and take up teaching as my profession. I considered what it had taken for me to set up my own firm and how hard I had worked at it then I asked myself whether I was working for the money. Was the money making the decision for me to stay in practice?

As an employee, I did not work for my boss. No. I did not think that my boss had anything to do with who I was. I had a passion for learning and for solving people’s problems. I also thought that my future was determined by how well I was able to deal with the challenges that life threw at me. I had high expectations of myself and I believed that I could be as good as the next lawyer. So I worked for myself even if I was in employment. If you accept to be in employment, then you must make the best of it and accept that your boss is in charge. If you are not happy with your job, find something else to do with your work.

The fear I had when I started out was the fear of competition. There were so many other law firms in the city, it was difficult to imagine that there could be place for one more. What convinced me to just do it is that there were those who did not manage to even get a job after law school yet I would meet then in court working. I told myself that if they could survive, so could I.

We make choices everyday, in fact, every moment, we are making choices. The reason is because we only have one body and can only be in one place at any given time. I cannot be here writing and in my bed sleeping and in my office working all at the same time. We have to plan our days, people make appointments with us and we choose what to do with ourselves at any given time. Some will say that they do not have any choice in the matter of whether or not to go to work but that is not true at all.

Something else I realized which helped propel me out of employment like a speeding bullet was that there is a big world out there. I would stand at the window of my office and look out and I would see so many people walking and driving by. Even if money was to make the decision of me leaving employment, the truth of the matter was that the proportion of money held by my boss was a morsel compared to the proportion of money out there. Those people out there were alive and well and some had even more money than my boss.

I considered the option of finding alternative employment and even attended an interview at a big law firm in the city. In my 5 years of practice, I had built up a reputation of sorts and some people were interested in my expertise. After a serious look at what I would be doing if I hopped from one boss to another, I realized that I would not be making any real change. A boss is an agent you engage to sell your work at a hefty commission while getting all the credit for it. The work I was doing had nothing to do with my boss per se. It was not his life at stake, it was the clients’ lives at stake. Why did I need a middle man standing between me and the clients and what was stopping me from being able to attract clients of my own?

We are all born with nothing and we all have to start from nowhere to get somewhere. My boss did not just fall from the sky and land in that office I was working in. Those whom he had employed before me and who were with him when he started off on his own would tell me stories of how hard it was when he first started out. The difference between those who choose to be self employed and those who choose to stay in employment is that the former are able to appreciate the value of their work enough to believe that if their work can generate profits for their bosses, it can do the same for them too. If you are good enough to be employed, you are also good enough to employ yourself. In actual fact, as long as you are willing to work for yourself whether in employment or self-employment, you will find something to do.

All these thoughts convinced me that starting off on my own was inevitable. What was there in my life to convince me to change my career path?