The courage to be “ordinary”

A conversation with Anne Briard, the insurance lawyer who is living her best life

Happy New Year, builders! Welcome to this latest installment of Fantastic Builders and Where to Find Them.

Recently I got called to account by my husband Matt for the conspicuous absence of career-typical paths in this series. Most people, he reminded me, are not and need not want to become founders. Most people—including some of the awesomest people we know—are pursuing traditional, well-charted career paths, like law or medicine or accounting or IT, and generally living a fairly ordinary and private life.

Matt’s comment made me realize that my almost exclusive showcasing of visionary entrepreneurs and innovators as exemplars of the “builder’s mindset” has instanced a common bias within the countercultural circles I spend my time in. But that very bias, ironically, has a drill-sergeant-y mentality built into it, and it underrepresents the range of ambitious, fully-lived lives that one can build.

So today, I’m spotlighting one of my favorite “career-typical” friends, Anne Briard, whose approach to life exemplifies the builder’s mindset to an uncommon degree.

Builder Spotlight: Anne Briard

Image credit: https://www.cozen.com/people/bios/briard-anne

Principles on display: The builder’s mindset as a third way; your life as the measure of all things; we build ourselves by building

Anne Briard is a liability and property insurance attorney you’ve probably never heard of, unless you happen to be part of her typically-sized professional or social circle. She is also one of the most principled, independent-minded, joyfully fulfilled humans I have the privilege to know. I first met Anne when she started dating my good friend Ben about a decade ago. Anne and Ben are now happily married, and let’s just say that seeing their relationship unfold not only made me rejoice on both their behalfs, but also inspired new heights of optimism and romantic ambitiousness in me.

That said, I’d never really asked Anne much about her work or how she built herself into the person she is today. So last week I sat down with her to get the full story. Here are some highlights from our conversation (which paid subscribers can read in full below).

Forming a vision for her life

Growing up with wonderfully loving but “sort of Bohemian” parents in rural New Jersey, Anne knew from early on that she was “a little bit different.” Jokingly comparing herself to Alex P. Keaton, the Michael J Fox character from Family Ties—who rebels against his hippie parents by being conservative and wealth-oriented—Anne said she always “wanted to make a good living, but I also wanted to do something that was kinda hard.”

Between seeing the nicer houses and toys that some of her wealthier friends could afford, reading books like Roald Dahl’s Matilda about “kids who were in kind of chaotic houses and wanted to change things for themselves,” and visiting New York City with her family twice a year and seeing what a “different kind of place it was”, Anne formed a vision of the kind of life she wanted to build for herself.

Hearing Anne talk about how she compared herself to the children with nicer houses and became “interested in more materialistic things than the other people in my family” got me curious. Without further context, these statements seem almost tailor-made to fit the cultural stereotype of the “soulless, money-hungry lawyer,” and yet nothing about the adult Anne I know even remotely resembles this stereotype. So I asked: what was it about the “nicer houses” that appealed to her? Was it something about the success and status those nicer houses represented, and a need to prove that she too could be successful, a la “keeping up with the Joneses”? Or was it literally about wanting a nicer house?

It was literally about wanting a nice house, she said. Specifically, it was about being out in the world and having her own place, ideally in a cool city that’s “more in the center of things,” surrounded by people “doing interesting things, living interesting lives.” And because she knew that this kind of lifestyle would cost a good deal of money, she wanted a well-paying job.

And how did she land on law in particular? Because she wanted a job where she could “solve real problems,” and she had excelled in the humanities more than she had in math or science—partly owing to a “really tough” humanities teacher in middle school who had inspired her to really “work at something to get good at it” for the first time.

Reclaiming the “ordinary”

Interestingly, Anne set these demanding goals and standards for herself, not due to any drill-sergeant-coded pressure from her family, but in spite of their Zen-like resistance to such pressure. As she described it, “my parents didn't really pressure me to do anything. Like, in my house, I kinda got the sense of, you know what? Everyone in this family is so creative… My mom's like, you girls, you're actually the smartest kids, you don't really have to apply yourselves. You'll just do great no matter what because you're creative and you're different.” Yet Anne observed the world around her and formed a contrary conclusion: that she could go much farther—in the sense of building a more vibrant, enjoyable life—to the extent that she did apply herself.

What became increasingly evident through our conversation was just how radically Anne’s motivation differed both from the stereotypical “corporate-ladder-climber” drill sergeant mentality and the “Bohemian” Zen mentality. It was not an anxious internalization of what counts as status or success. It certainly wasn’t viewing normal paths critically, as an inherent rat race. Anne saw something ordinary, and, in working to understand it, embraced it as her own.

When one has desires that are in the range of ordinary, it can be its own kind of challenge. We live in a culture that is especially bad at imbuing ordinary things with meaning. Status, sure, but meaning—moral approbation and spiritual importance—not so much. It is more common either to rebel against ordinary paths or to pursue them in a guilty and/or deliberately mercenary way. It takes a certain chutzpah to see a common path and learn to view it as the basis of a life fully lived.

Iterating on the vision

This difference in fundamental approach continued to manifest itself throughout Anne’s story. For instance, whereas someone on a default “ladder-climbing” path might have felt a pressure to go straight to law school immediately after college, Anne decided to take a year off after graduating from Cornell so she could experience the “real world” before going back to school. And because Anne longed for independence, she took a “bit of a risk” and seized on an opportunity: one of her college friends had moved to Boston and was looking for a roommate, so Anne moved in with her and took a job as a baggage handler at Boston Logan Airport. The job paid $9/hour (in Boston!), but it was “interesting and fun and I got to fly places for free.” Even so, Anne knew this wasn’t her final career destination. A year later she began law school at Tulane University in New Orleans—the “cool city” of her dreams.

Perhaps the biggest difference in approach was the one already mentioned: that Anne wanted to do something hard. She yearned for hard, good work. She saw it not as a mere means to an end, nor as something to do only reluctantly and minimally, but as something worthwhile, as part of the life she wanted. For her this just took the form of quiet, consistent diligence. “I never skipped class” in law school, Anne told me.

I didn't really volunteer in class, but I listened to everything, and I took great notes. Then I would go home, type up my notes, I would read every case twice that they assigned us to read one time just casually, and then a second time taking notes in a notebook. To summarize it and, you know, try to get all the points down that they were expecting us to get.

It wasn't a slog. I got absorbed in it because every case was, like, a mystery; what am I supposed to be getting out of this? What really happened?

It’s in the embrace and intentionality of such practices that fulfillment is born. A great many people go to law school for a great many reasons. The ones who end up happy are not necessarily extraordinary in the sense of being wildly successful lawyers. They are the ones who learn to love the work, to do things like think of studying as a mystery, as something worth being curious about. These experiences of exercising one’s agency to enjoy and persist on one’s path, day in and day out, are the stones out of which a life is built.

As a further case in point: Anne did not enjoy her first job out of law school, partly because there was a culture of cynicism about the work. The senior attorneys left early, and the junior attorneys were expected to work weekends—not because the work was really urgent, but just to be able to add to the invoice. “Now I happily work Saturdays or late at night because this is my project, and I like what I'm doing, and I wanna help my client”, Anne told me. “Back then, it felt like we were just churning to bill hours.”

So Anne left that firm after 3 years, despite not having another job lined up, and she took a year off to explore what she might want to do next. As she put it, “I needed that break to reset myself, kind of like I did between college and law school.” During that time she really connected with her love of New Orleans, especially in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; she even took some graduate classes in Urban Planning to explore how she might be able to support the city. In the process she also became more opinionated about what mattered to her in a work culture and what kinds of clients she wanted to serve.

By the end of that year, she had a better idea of what she was looking for: “I didn't have a plan about where I wanted to end up, but I knew the kind of thing I wanted to do… I wanted to protect and promote businesses that wanted to be in Louisiana, because I loved it there.” So she took a job at a New Orleans-based insurance law firm that allowed her to do just that: defend liability and property insurance companies against capricious lawsuits that risked pushing them out of the state and ultimately hurting the local businesses they insured. Anne had seen first-hand, in the aftermath of Katrina, that many insurance companies were being sued to pay for flood damages that, in her judgment, they had never agreed and should not be expected to pay. Moreover, she saw people using insurance claims as a cudgel to force other changes onto the city, like making it harder for bars to operate.

Anne came to like—not cynically, but earnestly—the idea of defending insurance companies, even the very concept of insurance itself. And this meant even more to her in a context where her favorite city’s economy and nightlife were at stake. Crucially, her new firm also provided “a different culture than anywhere I worked before. People showed up for work, they seemed pretty happy to be there… and they were very serious and non-cynical about what they were doing.”

In the years since, Anne has continued to grow and challenge herself in the kind of work she does—she worked in-house for a Montessori school network for a while, and now she’s working for a law firm where her job includes being a trial lawyer, defending her clients before a judge and jury. Her sincere engagement with everyday legal work, largely on behalf of the types of ordinary large businesses that seem so hollow to so many, has and continues to be the solid bedrock of a great and intentionally built life.

Best of all, when I shared this impression with Anne, she not only knew what I meant but supplied a bunch more examples of “career-typical” people living their best lives:

I meet people like that all the time, by the way, in different areas, because I represent a lot of different kind of businesses. I was talking to a truck driver and he was telling me how… they get together with other drivers, and they have lunches together and talk about the best way to do things. And, you know, how to rescue a car if it drives over a bridge and things like that. So there are people doing their jobs in creative ways…even ones you don't think about too much.

Hats off to that truck driver, I say, and may we all bring such extraordinary creativity and care to the jobs that constitute our life—however “ordinary” they may be.

For the unabridged version of Anne’s story, read the full transcript below.