I just finished my second week of law school, and when people say it's a lot of reading...it's a lot of reading—even for someone who loves to read like me.

But I've been explaining to people that, so far, the material isn't hard, it's the volume. It doesn't take the same type of brain power that learning calculus does, but the amount of information you're expected to absorb (and retain) is a lot.

But that's not what this post is about.

I had very little formal training or experience in the law before going to law school. I had a laymen's understanding of the Constitution and knew that we live in a common law system, but I still expected most of the "rules" that govern society to be somewhat clear.

They're not.

For the ten days I've been in school, this was frustrating to me for nine of them. When we're given cases to read, I want to be able to finish the case and understand that rule completely. I felt like I could do that the first week, but then during the second week we read so many cases that essentially reversed the rules we read in the first week, or changed them so drastically, that those cases aren't as clear as I thought they were.

On the face of it, that isn't too difficult to understand. It's important to know how the law has changed over the years because it will change again. The difficult part is that the new cases don't "wipe away" the old ones every time. They're only applicable sometimes...and other times the original ones apply...and sometimes none of them apply! Can you see how this becomes difficult?

This was really starting to confuse me until one of my professors made an off-hand comment that is going to be my motto for the rest of my time in law school—and maybe even after I graduate.

A student was trying to get clarification for when we're supposed to use one standard over another, and my professor kind of took a deep breath and said something alone the lines of: You guys want me to give you a bright line answer. If I could give you a bright line answer, I'd be on the Supreme Court because I could say 'This is the law now, move on.' But practicing law is not like that. Ambiguity is where the work is. If there wasn't ambiguity, we wouldn't have jobs.

Ambiguity is where the work is.

I immediately wrote that phrase down in my notebook and have been thinking about it all week. Before, the ambiguity was frustrating; now, it's exciting. Yes! Ambiguity—that means I get to research this problem and think deeply about what I think should happen (or shouldn't happen), come up with an argument for why, and then argue that. Ambiguity is where the work (and the money) is. If the law was black and white, and anyone could easily figure out what to do, there would be no need for lawyers. And the little need there would be for them wouldn't create the range of "Ok" lawyers, "good" lawyers, and "great" lawyers that we have today. Ambiguity gives me the opportunity to become great.

This isn't just in the legal field, though. Many people now are some sort of "knowledge worker." They don't work with their hands, they make proposals and sit in meetings and create strategy decks and figure out how to run their department. All of those situations are full of ambiguity. If there was a playbook, they wouldn't need to pay you! They could pay some kid who knows how to flip burgers at McDonald's to "flip burgers"—follow the exact steps laid out for them by "best practices" or something—in their marketing department.

Embrace the ambiguity. That's where the work (and the money) is.