I am convinced that the only reason I was able to get an articling position in 1985 for 1986 at what was then Smith, Lyons, Torrence, Stevenson & Mayer (now part of Gowlings) was that I simply wore down the then two co-heads of recruitment, the Late Honourable Glenn Hainey and Stephen R. Coxford. I should add that Stikeman, Elliott (then with the comma), where I would join as a Partner in 1997 and where I became Managing Partner in 2012 never even gave me an interview. I wish I had kept that letter.
I spent the first part of my articles in the litigation group, working away primarily on a hearing in front of the National Energy Board where the issue at hand was to determine ying to whether a piece of pipe somewhere in Niagara Region was subject to Federal or Provisional authority. What a country Canada is.
Late in that rotation, I was toiling away one night in the library (yes, law firms once had real libraries) when the aforementioned Steve Coxford showed up and casually with a smile tossed a bunch of papers in my direction. He said that as I was shortly going to be joining the corporate rotation, there was an IPO that was about to start and that he would like my help. At that point, I thought I wanted to practice tax law, but that is another story for another blog.
In the mid 1980s, there was no voice mail. There were pink or yellow missed call slips. The desk phones did have a screen with one line of text and a missed call light. You could scroll and determine who had called you and at what time. Times have changed.
Having started working on this IPO (The International Pagurian Corporation Limited), I came into the office two days in a row to see that Steve had called me each day at 730 am. Now, I did not finish law school anywhere near the top of my class and I have never been the smartest person in the room, but it only took me two days to figure out that if I wanted to work with Steve (which I did) and to be like Steve (which I did) then I best have my tuchus in the chair at 729 am each morning, which from then on, I did. The strategy seemed to have paid off.
To this day, I continue to get up early (and I like to be in bed early too) and I try to be at the desk for 730am, wherever the desk may be. Now, it may only be for half an hour or hour to clear out overnight emails or write a blog post, but the discipline and muscle memory remains.
Determine who you want to emulate and learn from them and incoprorate their good habits. It will serve you well over your career and life and it will take you places you would never have dreamed you could get to. And when you have the time, pick up and read The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.