Sprinting to the Finish

All lawyers should pursue financial independence. Few, if any, should retire early.

In August 2010, Russia, a supposedly frigid land, was literally on fire. Forest fires ignited during a blistering summer heat wave, wrapping Moscow in smoke thick enough to ground flights at Sheremetyevo Airport. I know because I was there. My college friends and I spent two weeks sweating our way through the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Financially, we were in that post-college awkward stage I’m sure many friend groups know well: two guys with adult jobs that paid vastly different amounts; two in law school; and two teaching English, herding goats, or doing whatever else one does in the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan. Given our wide-ranging budgets, we stayed in hostels chosen for their price and endured for the same reason. “Air conditioning” in these glorified army barracks was an open, screenless window that doubled as an engraved invitation to mosquitoes and moths. We made do until the black smoke slowly overwhelming the city was too much to bear. When we couldn’t take it anymore, we surrendered and spent the last two nights at the Moscow Sheraton. As Moscow was one of the world’s most expensive cities at the time, this was no cheap date.

An important detail I should note at the outset: I almost didn’t take that trip. (Despite the heat, fires, bugs, and heaps of sour cream on seemingly every piece of food in the country, it was still life-changing and amazing.) At the time, I was a devout practitioner of the FIRE—Financial Independence, Retire Early—movement. But I wasn’t like the movement’s rich doctors or tech workers, who were motivated more by principled idealism than by immediate financial need. My FIRE-inspired scrounging and saving were also survival tactics; I was a government paralegal with significant student loan debt. So, I ran the numbers on two weeks in Russia the same way I’d been running them on everything else. Which is to say, carefully. Too carefully. Unable to justify the trip’s $2,000 price tag, I dithered for weeks over whether to join the group. I’m glad my friends coaxed me into going. Left to my own devices, I nearly optimized my way out of one of the great experiences of my life.

I mention this, and the hostels, so you understand the state I was in when I flopped onto that king-sized bed. I had at my disposal air conditioning after two weeks of smoke and 100-degree days; American television after two weeks of nothing familiar; and the mind of a committed super-saver running on overdrive at all times. I was happy; I was content; and I was as receptive to prudent financial or retirement-related advice as any human could be.

On the screen was Charlie Rose, interviewing David Rubenstein, co-founder of The Carlyle Group. I didn’t know much about Rubenstein at the time, but I knew he was already a multibillionaire—a man who could have stopped working during the Clinton administration. Rose asked him, in so many words, why he hadn’t. It was because Rubenstein was playing a very long game: he planned to spend his later years sprinting to the finish to maximize his civic and human impact and produce a life with few regrets.

Sprinting to the finish. In the sixteen years since I first heard that phrase, Rubenstein has used it regularly in interviews. It’s become my adopted mantra, too, and I’ve begun to understand exactly why it lands so well with me. Look at the scene: that night, I was living a small, air-conditioned version of what some consider their FIRE dream. I had comfort, idleness, a plush bathrobe, and nothing stood between the minibar and me. And yet, the only thing in the room that excited me was a man in his sixties describing his staggering workload, which, to him, didn’t feel like work. Rubenstein had won the game under any scoring system you care to use, yet he was not describing a glide path or a wind-down. He was describing some sort of geriatric dead sprint with as much conviction and enthusiasm as the permanently droll and dry David Rubenstein can muster. Whatever spark he had, I remember thinking, might not be something early retirement can provide me.

The half that’s right

Even if it’s because they misread the movement, FIRE has persuaded many high earners that the object of working life is to end it. To the committed, this isn’t that hard because the basic FIRE recipe is simple enough: save ferociously, invest sensibly, and quit somewhere between 35 and 45. A striking number of practitioners are professionals, no doubt including many associates at large law firms.

What follows is not an outsider’s complaint. I lived FIRE in my twenties and thirties and remain grateful for it. A good deal of what I have, including the standing to advise people for a living, I owe to years of dutiful adherence to this important movement.

The FI half remains unimpeachable. Saving half (or more) of your income, refusing lifestyle inflation, treating financial independence as a real goal rather than a daydream: this is a playbook that will set you free. And the FIRE crowd practices it with a special-forces-level discipline that, if widely adopted, would make financial advisors fear for their jobs.

It’s the RE half that could use a tweak.

Phase three

Ask what happens to someone who “retires” at 34 with a paid-off house and a seven-figure portfolio. The honest ones will tell you. First, it’s glorious; then it’s pleasant; and then, somewhere in what I’ll call phase three, you start asking yourself questions. What am I doing with my life? For that matter, what am I doing all day?

I got an involuntary preview of phase three. In the depths of COVID, a law firm and I parted ways on the firm’s initiative, leaving me with the two assets FIRE promises its graduates: sufficient cash and ample free time. With the world shuttered, and my gym—and therefore the beloved sauna that I used regularly—closed, my mind wandered. Walking down the street one afternoon, I was ambushed by a two-part question that had apparently been waiting for an opening: Why aren’t there more saunas in the world? And could I do anything to change that? So, I set out to fix it by building a mobile sauna, ostensibly for business purposes, with two high school friends in one of their garages.

I briefly pursued sauntrepreneurship as the most nascent of businesses before concluding that the world’s sauna deficit, real as it is, concealed no business I actually wanted to run. But I regret nothing about this chapter. I deepened wonderful, old friendships and made new and interesting ones. Plus, I now have a glorious, painstakingly crafted wood-fired sauna at my disposal whenever I want.

What strikes me, in retrospect, about my wonderfully weird sauna adventure is how quickly it went from absurd idea to action. Give a mind trained for structured, consequential work a few months and a blank canvas, and it does not relax. It improvises. The sauna wasn’t leisure; it was my professional drive, escaped from the office, roaming the neighborhood like a border collie with no sheep.

Psychologists have a word for the drive in question. Generativity, the need to contribute to something that outlasts you, and the research on it is about as one-sided as research gets: people who stay engaged and useful in later life are healthier and happier than people who withdraw. Indeed, work, despite its flaws, is the most reliable way we’ve ever found to get challenge, community, and forward motion in a single package.

Lawyers ought to be especially suspicious of the escape fantasy version of FIRE, because they’re particularly susceptible to it. And you know exactly why. The non-leap year February in which you billed 300 hours. The flurry of redlines at two in the morning. Partner emails with three question marks and no greeting. Those are the worst years of a legal career, and deciding at 29 that work is misery and that you want out with no plan, based on these years, is like deciding during a Moscow heat wave that Russia has no winter.

I won’t insult lawyers with the usual consolation that it gets better with seniority. Law is stingier with autonomy than nearly any comparably paid profession. Partnership is mostly a lower rung on a higher ladder, with the billable hour following you right up it, and going in-house trades one set of masters for another while you become a scrutinized cost center. You may well not find fulfillment or satisfy your generativity drive in law. But that is an argument against law’s default path, not against work. The people who control their days—the owners and principals who have built practices and careers answerable mainly to themselves and their clients—did not get there by quitting. They got there by continuing to press forward in more productive and personally agreeable directions, making the most of the skills they acquired working in the law.

Look at what Rubenstein, a former lawyer himself, has done since that 2010 interview. He took the chairmanship of the Kennedy Center that same year and held it for fourteen. He has chaired the Smithsonian, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the National Gallery of Art. He hosts interview programs. He buys rare copies of the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence and lends them back to the country. In 2024, at 74, an age at which his FIRE-minded juniors expect to be three decades into their leisure, he bought the Baltimore Orioles. None of it pays like private equity. All of it uses everything he knows. Sprinting to the finish is not about a paycheck or accumulating more money ad absurdum. It is about refusing to load-manage or bench yourself while you can still play the game creatively and boldly, and doing deeply impactful, community- and society-building work at the highest level for as long as you can.

Warren Buffett makes the same point by example. He tap-danced to work into his tenth decade, and when he finally handed the chief executive’s job to Greg Abel, he kept the chairman’s seat rather than head for the door. Charlie Munger, another lawyer, reimagined, was dispensing terse brilliance until age 99. These are not men who failed to run the retirement numbers. They ran a different calculation: the work you choose freely is not the price of a good life but a part of one.

Upon reaching financial independence, a talented legal professional’s first instinct shouldn’t be to retire early. Indeed, to someone with so much to give, financial independence means not the ability to stop working, but the ability to stop working on other people’s terms. Firing the client who mistreats your team or taking the meaningful but low-paying nonprofit job become possible.  Teaching and writing become more realistic options. Regardless of your preferences, the real freedom lies in keeping going and building a great life you actually want.

A man who likely couldn’t agree more is Pete Adeney, or, as he’s known to the internet, Mr. Money Mustache.

The godfather’s confession

Adeney retired from software engineering at 30 and promptly built one of the most influential personal-finance publications in America, opened a coworking space, and swung a hammer on more construction projects than many contractors, all while cheerfully deflecting a group he calls the Internet Retirement Police, who insist his perpetual motion disqualifies him from claiming to be retired.

When pressed, he doesn’t dispute the critique. He has written, in a post cataloging what the world gets wrong about his movement, that FIRE was never truly about early retirement. The acronym is a misnomer, but it survives because it’s catchy and retirement sells. His actual, nuanced instruction is to quit any job you wouldn’t keep doing if the pay stopped. Then, work hard at what matters for the rest of your life. Indeed, financial independence should free you to be your best self.

To the reader stuck in a job she would quit the moment the money allowed, Adeney and I would give identical advice: quit it. I just believe that we should permanently rename the next step, and the semantic difference matters because labels write plans. An unfulfilled 31-year-old law firm associate who hears “retire early” plots an exit: a number, a date, and a departure. Ask her to plan a second act instead, and you get a different project with different math. Or maybe just a blank stare.

Adeney believes that every objection to FIRE dissolves once you understand the movement properly. I agree. At its core, FIRE is a fellowship of folks who bought their freedom and found a better version of themselves on the other side. All I am asking is for a rename and a reframe, at least for a specific group of FIRE adherents: lawyers. When lawyers think about themselves and their careers in the context of the FIRE movement, the acronym should not stand for Financial Independence, Retire Early. It should instead stand for “Financial Independence, Renegotiate Everything.”

Your career is not a contract of adhesion

Lawyers should appreciate a renaming and reframing that emphasizes continual renegotiation. You negotiate for a living. You know properly defined terms are essential. You also know that leverage comes from having a credible alternative, and that alternative’s value often lies more in holding it than exercising it. The party who can walk gets better terms. The party that does walk—or rides off into the sunset in their professional prime—may well get nothing.

You also know that serious negotiations aren’t binary. You would never let a client treat a deal as all-or-nothing when there are forty terms on the table. Yet you might also be thinking about your career this way: BigLaw or bust; partnership or bust; seven figures or bust. But your career doesn’t have to be a contract of adhesion foisted upon you by either your professional overlords or your own impossibly high standards. It can be redlined. Your hours, your clients, your practice area, your geography, who you answer to, and how many weeks a year you work are, in a sense, terms. Every year of saving improves your position on all of them.

And a renegotiation, unlike a retirement, has no end date. You do it again whenever your leverage improves, which, if you are saving properly, is every year you keep at it.

The last lap

There’s something about this deeper meaning of FIRE that I find more fulfilling—and empowering—than retiring early. Lawyers have all the skills to contribute, massively and meaningfully, to countless institutions and causes they care about. So, consider using your talent to stay in, find something you love, and pursue it passionately. The world will be a better place, and you will become a better version of yourself, because you did.

Sixteen years after that hotel room in smoky Moscow, I understand what struck me about Rubenstein’s phrase such that I still reflect on it regularly. Lying on that hotel bed, all I could think about was getting out: of the heat and smoke, and, as a FIRE devotee, of work at my earliest opportunity. But Rubenstein was talking about staying in. And he was the one who sounded perfectly free.