Jason Pfeiffer
speaker
203 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Jason Pfeiffer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Because Sean, I will tell you, Nicole and I both experienced this and continue to experience it, which is that no matter what your accomplishment is and no matter how much money you make, it suddenly does not seem like enough because there's always more that you could get. So at some point you have to know what you're actually aiming for. Do you have that in your head?
The point that Nicole is making is that you can't tell this negative story of yourself where the punchline of it is and now you're stuck or now you've wasted so much time. Rather, everything that you did served some kind of purpose. You were pursuing passions. You were interested in things. You learned a lot about what you want and what you don't want. And
it now informs the next decisions that you make. The question now is, starting from right now, what do we do? Stick around. Help Wanted will be right back.
Welcome back to Help Wanted. Let's get to it. Now I want to think through how you make more money. When you reached out, part of your wonder was, is it time to just make another career change? Just do something totally different again. And look, Maybe it is if you want to totally just optimize for money.
But also, before you do that, I would want to step back and say, all right, what do I have here in the world of paralegal? Can I look around and see what other paralegals are making and where and what it takes to get there? Maybe some sacrifices do have to be made. You, for example, have said that you don't want to drive into Boston.
But maybe if you start pushing yourself closer to Boston and taking a longer commute, you it translates into more dollars and ultimately the balance there is better.
Or maybe some of the skills that you've picked up in paralegal work actually translate really well to some adjacent field that doesn't require a full reboot of what you do, but that ultimately does pay better or gives you access to better paying employers or something like that. So have you looked into any of that? I have not.
So thank you.
Nicole makes an excellent point. You know how to do a lot of different things. The story of your career is actually one of accumulating a lot of skill sets. And you haven't actually stepped back and said, how do these things snap together in a way in which they're all useful?
Sean, here's something that I think you should do. You should look around and see what problems you can solve for people. Perhaps part of the reasons that you feel insecure is because if you don't know the problems that you can solve for people, then all you're doing is showing up and demanding their attention.
And you don't know if they're busy or if they have a need or why they would care about you. But if you know the problems that you can solve... Then suddenly you see a role for yourself. So what would a problem be that you can solve? I don't know that much about the legal world, but I do know this because I've heard it from friends who are lawyers or who work in law firms that.
Lawyers do not know how to write in a way that is not a complicated legal brief. They struggle with communication. And communicating in a way that is not a legal brief is an important thing that people need to know how to do, and that includes lawyers. And that's the reason why a lot of law firms actually hire outside consultants to teach their lawyers how to write like regular human beings.
Now, here is you, someone who has worked professionally as a communicator in a plain English kind of way, who also has developed the skills of a teacher to teach skills to other people, and you are sitting in a law firm, or you're at least sitting in an industry, I can't speak to your specific firm, these are people who are
probably very aware that a shortcoming of theirs is their ability to communicate in a non-legal way. Now we have identified a problem and you as a solution. And it might be worth even just volunteering or coming up with some kind of system or something that you can introduce to at your firm, see if people like it, maybe you become much more valuable there.
Maybe you take on a totally different role there. Maybe you create a whole department there. Or maybe you become really valuable in a way that they love but aren't going to pay you for. But now you have something that you can take somewhere else and say, ah, I am doubly valuable. I'm a really good paralegal. And also, I run this program teaching the lawyers how to write.
And now somebody is going to pay you a lot more. That is how you take somebody's problem and connect it to the snapping together of the skills that you have accrued.
You haven't quite figured out how to make the boundaries of what you think work are more flexible. I realized that getting ahead and making the kind of money that I wanted required doing multiple kinds of work at the same time. The Gardner News was the only job, that first job that we worked at, the only job I ever worked at where I just did that job.
After that, I have always, including right now, freelanced on the side of whatever full-time job that I had, always. And that was where my extra income came from and that's where my advancement opportunities came from because that's what got me in front of the next set of people that were gonna create the next set of opportunities.
And that is available to you.
And the reason we got to where we are here today is because in all of these cases, the answer doesn't start externally. It's not just about make this one other decision. It's internal. The work has to start internally, which is why what we did is we spent a lot of time trying to understand what your goals were and what your skills are and where your interests are and then what matters to you.
Showing 21–40 of 203 · page 2 of 11
← Previous
Next →