As a former collegiate gymnast, I am no stranger to the discipline and intensity of mastering a technical craft. Excellent performance in the sport requires grueling hours dedicated to conditioning your mind and body for precise alignment. For example, when flying over the high bar, stretching your arms just a bit more after you let go of the bar could be the difference between catching it and falling flat on your face. 

Even at its most foundational level, like holding a handstand, gymnastics requires an extremely detail-oriented and analytical approach. When I decided to become a lawyer, I knew that years of painstakingly paying attention to detail in gymnastics would come in handy for the high standards of diligence in the legal profession. However, I did not expect the personal insights I gained from years of striving towards perfection in the sport to apply in my 1L law practice course.

Gymnastics, like legal research and writing, is a very technical discipline. It has many complex and demanding rules governing the structure of routines and the quality of skills. It is not enough to complete a back tuck and land on your feet (an already difficult task) to say you did the skill well.

You must meet several standards—pointed toes and upright chest from the moment of take-off; ample height in the air; knees completely together until landing; upright chest during the landing (I could go on, but I will stop here). These standards are revised every four years and outlined in a massive document called the Code of Points, and even the slightest deviation from these standards will cost you in performance evaluation. Sound familiar? 

Much like gymnastics, legal research and writing is built around strict criteria of what is correct to present. Whether this includes effectively performing the IRAC method or citing a string of cases in a way that passes Bluebook muster, this often incentivizes us to hyperfocus on perfection. 

While striving for perfection may not necessarily be bad, fixating on a perfect end goal often backfires. In gymnastics, the more I focused on doing every component of a new skill correctly, the more likely I would tense up and lose control of completing the skill. Likewise, trying to be correct in every sense on the first draft of a memo often leads to writer’s block and places an unreasonable hurdle to overcome in the short term.

In both gymnastics and legal writing, flexibility is vital. Mid-routine, a misplacement of my hand on the pommel horse would require me to separate my legs or lean drastically in one direction to stay on. In legal research and writing, I often find that the structure and substance of my legal analysis needs reworking as I go and that it is better to embrace this possibility at the outset. Like adjusting my routine to keep myself from falling, letting go of my original vision can be humbling, but changing for a better outcome in the long run is far more gratifying. 

For my fellow 1Ls, I know that LP memo grades are either here or soon to arrive. Some of us may feel frustrated when our work does not meet the standards imposed by the legal profession, our professors, or even the ones we set for ourselves. But if there is anything that gymnastics has taught me, it is that excellence in any technical discipline does not happen in a single, perfect attempt. 

As you receive feedback from professors on your memos, I encourage you to remember that learning from failure in the beginning is often the key to long-term success. In gymnastics, I frequently found myself in positions where I performed a skill in the long term much closer to perfection when I prioritized applying corrections in the best way I could in the short term, even if that looked like falling several times in different ways. 

Like success in gymnastics, success in legal research and writing does not merely come from rigidly adhering to some ever-changing construct of perfection. Rather, it comes from embracing the art of letting go—of failure, perfectionism, even self-imposed standards—to iteratively try, fail, learn, and try again.

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Malcolm Baytop is a first-year student at BC Law. Contact him at baytop@bc.edu.