Episode 262 - Kershwin Singh

yeah yeah i mean a lot of effort you you know Um, a lot of focus, but there's also this, you know, I always have a, a feeling that you have to experience life as you go through the different stages and that you cannot be just focused on one thing.

So there's a lot of different focuses as you move forward in your career.

So you pass, uh, you pass the bar.

You are, Oh, before I have a question.

you were trained up in law in South Africa and then you're going, you know, essentially through law school here where they're surprising things like in, you know, us loss, like what was your state coming into it? You know, and I'm trying to kind of compare this to somebody who's maybe a surgeon in another country and they have to get a medical, you know, license here.

They're, they're working on the same bodies, right? Like a body is a body, you know, the human body is kind of the same everywhere where they're, So I'm just saying a lot of that probably transfers.

Were there certain aspects of like your foundational learning of the law in South Africa that overlapped or that were significantly different that were surprising?

So interestingly, even though South Africa has a different legal system, very similar to English and it's Roman Dutch, the principles that you learn in law school sort of just are the same.

When I took the New York bar, because I did a master's in insurance law, I didn't do any of the subjects that the New York bot questions you on.

And people normally do the Barbary course, which is a 30-day course before you take the bar, which you're studying for six to eight hours every day to take the bar exam.

And because I had a new job, I wasn't able to do that.

So I just reviewed a summary book and When I took the bar, I didn't think I'd pass because I'm like, okay, I didn't go to law school here.

I didn't do this 30-day intensive course.

I'm reading this one summary book.

I have a new baby.

You know, I don't have a lot of time.

I've got a new job.

Yeah.

And I passed, but I think part of it is because I thought about the principles.

What are the principles? You don't have to know everything.

You don't have to read every book, treatise, to understand what the principles are, and you can practically come up with a solution.

So you also think, if you've never heard the question, practically what should the answer be? And that's sort of how I did it.

So it's such a great metaphor though for life, right? Because you're always kind of encountering problems that maybe you haven't encountered before and you have to just kind of make your best guess based on your past experience, the principles and so forth.

And it's interesting how transferable those principles are.

I kind of had a similar thing in, you know, I kind of came up through finance and accounting And sitting for my CPA, it's like, if you know the principles underlying accounting, you can probably guess the answer.