I’m fast approaching the decade mark for time in the title industry. My favorite (and most humbling) yardstick for measuring time is my team’s families. The third employee to be hired at my title agency had an 8-year-old at the time. Throughout the years, he would spend some time at the office and shred files for quarters. That shy, soft-spoken 8-year-old is now a high school graduate and college student. A month ago I was invited to attend his prom send off and while I was there, he asked if he could work a few hours a week at the agency before his college classes started. I readily agreed and he spent the next couple of weeks reorganizing and cleaning up files. I didn’t have too much for him to do, but at the end of his last day, I sat with him to ask what he learned during his time at the office. I like to provide objectives, a desired final outcome, and let the person figure out how to arrive there. Some like to ask for clarification, want a step-by-step guide. Others operate best with autonomy and figure it out for themselves. He was the second type.
But by the end of our chat, I couldn’t help but offer some unsolicited advice for this young adult heading off to college. I didn’t plan to give advice, nor did he request it, but for some reason I couldn’t help myself. I gave him three pieces of advice: 1. Under no circumstances, ever, do you operate or allow someone else to operate a vehicle under the influence including bikes, scooters, and cars. Pay for an Uber, Lyft, taxi; I will be happy to put my credit card on your account. Do it for others and do it for yourself. 2. You are the sum of the people you surround yourself with. It’s easy to make good choices when the people around you have the same values and integrity. Trust yourself, your gut, your intuition. You already have everything you need to make those determinations. 3. Professors are just people. Yes, they have important and valuable information to provide to you. But weaved throughout that information are their own opinions, experiences, and biases. They aren’t infallible and you should not regard them as such. Take the information that you need and leave the rest if it does not serve you.
We were both a little surprised at my unplanned outburst and as we stared at each other for a second in silence, I finished by saying, with a shrug, “At least, that’s the advice I wish someone had given me when I was 18.”
Ever since that conversation, those three pieces of advice have been rattling around in my head. Why those three things? I knew enough to discern that it wasn’t about the college student and it was specific to my own experiences in higher education. Did it apply to my career as well?
Advice #1 is really just risk management. The first two years of law school, I lived about an hour away from campus. I worked at a restaurant on the weekends and rarely had time to participate in the law school parties. This one time though, I was able to make it. I knew I would be drinking so I made plans to crash on my friend’s couch that night. Through a miscommunication he thought I had changed plans and he left the party without me. When I was ready to leave, and unable to reach him, I had a choice to make. The risk: from putting innocent people’s safety in jeopardy to ending my legal career before it began, there were too many risks to count with me driving myself the hour home. This was pre-Uber days. So I made the decision to call every schoolmate I could think of to see if they would pick up me. I’ll never forget the extreme relief and gratitude I felt when a classmate who had already gone home for the night drove back to the party to pick me up.
Often, the weighing of risk is not that black and white. And in the insurance industry, we make risk determinations daily. But my advice to this new college student still holds up for unnecessary, avoidable risk: it’s an easy no. As a business owner, an employer, and an attorney, part of my role is to ensure that people don’t take unnecessary risks. There are always options and alternatives. Even if they seem time-consuming or costly at the time, they often end up being far better off than the alternative.
Advice #2 has no expiration on relevance. The first weeks of college, even for a commuter like me, felt like a race to create a friend group to avoid discomfort. Those relationships forged during the early days of a new environment can have surprising longevity. But longevity and loyalty do not outweigh the massive effect the people closest to you have on the quality of your life. From skipping classes to workplace gossip, you cannot overestimate the impact the people you surround yourself with have on your development and growth. I like to ask myself, “Would 5th grade Liz be impressed by the people I spend time with?”
Advice #3 is in my opinion the most helpful advice. I spent a lot of my early 20s being captivated by professors, managers, bosses, anyone in an authority position. I assumed that they had all some secret information I had yet to learn and every sentence they issued was infallible. But it’s not. I’ve had professors bully me for religious and political beliefs because they didn’t align with their own. I’ve also had professors open my mind and give me the tools to think critically and formulate my own opinions. The point: you get to choose. You choose what sticks and what falls away. What is helpful and what is noise. It’s not about respect or following the rules; that should be inherent. It’s about discerning when someone is providing you with relevant information to your objective and when someone is opining based on their individual experiences (like I am right at this moment). If it helps you, use it. If it hurts you, don’t. If it makes you uncomfortable, dig deeper to find which direction it’s pushing you towards. But anyone, regardless of position, age, authority, who makes you feel ignorant, belittles you, silences you, or demands blind loyalty is only operating in their best interests, not yours.
I have no idea how much, if any, of my advice stuck with my employee’s son. I have no idea how much would have stuck with me if provided the same advice at that time in my life. There could have been countless pieces of advice thoughtfully bestowed upon me that I promptly ignored. Some things you can only learn through experience. Whether it was starting college or your first job, the advice is the same.
What’s the best advice you could have received when you were 18?
