Two Steps From Hell

When you think about it, I have a very strange job.

I am not a trial lawyer; I’m a corporate and regulatory attorney. But much of what I do every day bears the same relationship to a chess game that a trial lawyer would say his trial bears to a military battle. And chess, after all, is simply abstracted war.

I’m going to have to be circumspect about this, but here goes:

Even when you yourself think your cause is hopeless against the leviathan, you never stop fighting, even in retreat.

That’s the lesson I’ve learned to live by in the business world. Ironically, I learned it first by observing Bill Clinton, a master at slogging on, regardless, because eventually your enemies tire, or forget, or become interested in other things. And much more often than you think, you can win just by keeping your eye on the very, very long game. Survivalists and preppers act on this principle, even if they’ve never thought of it in those terms.

For the last seven years in business, I’ve been devoted to fighting existential threats, one after another, and defeated or evaded each one — with one exception.

Tonight, while at dinner with my wife and her friend, I quietly celebrated with a Bruichladdich 1988, an amazing Islay single-malt that was sweet, fruity, and with barely a hint of peat.

I was celebrating not a win, but an opportunity to win against that one remaining existential threat. Today the long game came through for us again, and in two weeks my colleagues and I will fight a battle we’d thought barred to us.

We’ve been preparing for this for the last three years. We laid the foundations without knowing when or how they’d be used; now we have two weeks to finish a fortress of paper and electrons in which to fight our battle; two weeks to solidify logistics and the all-important maskirovka; two weeks to train and drill our footsoldiers to say and do the right things and not do the wrong. And the stakes (for us) couldn’t be higher.

All afternoon I’ve been playing the Extended Version of Two Steps From Hell’s Strength of a Thousand Men. I expect it will be a daily listen for the next two weeks.

Lessons in duty, teamwork, leadership, strategy and tactics come together, from childhood Scouting and athletics to graduate academics, all reinforcing each other towards this one goal. It’s as though my entire life prepared me for this. And it’s days like this I utterly, completely love my job.

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