When I was a young associate, I struggled with detail oriented work. I’d miss all kinds of typos and mistakes. Which I’d usually realize only after hitting the “send” button. For some reason I never got the memo about proofreading emails before sending out important emails. I’ve always been like this, though. Growing up, I remember constantly being told that I needed to be more careful because mistakes wouldn’t be tolerated in “the real world.”
It’s funny how “the real world” is always used as a boogeyman. Like when teachers would tell me to memorize multiplication tables because “in the real world, you won’t be able to bring a calculator with you everywhere.” Or when they’d warn me to stop playing video games because “in the real world, you can’t make money doing that for a living.”
They were wrong about both1 so after I got older, I should’ve known to take their views on “the real world” with a grain of salt. But old lessons die hard. Even after college, I always viewed my lack of attention to detail as a flaw that needed correcting.
Going to law school certainly didn’t help.