Buried Lies: Why Successful Lawyers Can Win a Hundred Cases and Still Feel Like a Failure
Last week on this blog, I published “The Utopia Principle: Why the Best Lawyers — Like the Best Golfers — Stop Playing for the Crowd” — a deep dive into Dr. David Cook’s remarkable book, Golf’s Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia, and how the lessons a broken golfer learns from an eccentric Texas rancher mirror the transformation I guide successful lawyers through every day. If you haven’t read that post yet, I’d encourage you to — it lays the foundation for what I want to talk about this week.
But one chapter hit me harder than all the others — Chapter 9: “Buried Lies.” It’s the emotional climax of the entire book — the moment where everything the golfer has been learning converges into a single, gut-level confrontation with himself. Johnny Crawford hands the golfer paper and a pen and tells him to write down the lies that have been running his life — then bury them in the ground. And it’s the chapter that speaks most directly to what I see in the successful lawyers I coach.
I know because I lived it. And if someone had handed me a piece of paper years ago, I know exactly what I would have written.
For years — decades, really — if I ever lost a case, I thought I was a loser. A failure. It didn’t matter how much effort I’d poured into the preparation. It didn’t matter how devoted I was to the client or how committed I was to excellence. I could win a series of cases, build a track record anyone would be proud of, and then lose one — and all of it would evaporate. One loss erased everything.
I remember the Wilson case like it was yesterday. Employment discrimination. I was sitting at my desk when the judge’s decision arrived. Summary judgment — granted for the employer. My client’s entire case was thrown out of court completely. She would recover nothing. And she had been depending on me. I sat there staring at that ruling, and the only thought running through my mind was: How could I have lost this? What did I do wrong? What’s wrong with me?
It took years before I learned that the judge had granted summary judgment for the employer in every single discrimination case he’d heard. Every one. The loss had nothing to do with my preparation, my skill, or my worth as a lawyer. But by the time I learned that, the lie had already done its damage — years of carrying shame over a loss that was never mine to carry. I remember the anger I felt when I found out. And then something worse than anger — the quiet realization of how many years I’d spent blaming myself for something that had nothing to do with me. How many other verdicts had I let define me that had more to do with the circumstances than with who I was as a lawyer?
That’s a devastatingly difficult way to live. And I know I’m not the only successful lawyer who’s lived that way.
The Morning After the High
Chapter 9 opens on the morning after a strong practice round at the Links of Utopia — a humble nine-hole course in a tiny Texas town of 373 people. The golfer is riding high. He played well yesterday. He feels good. He’s expecting Johnny Crawford, the eccentric rancher who’s been mentoring him all week, to congratulate him.
Instead, Johnny meets him with a question that stops him cold: “You used yesterday’s fine round to validate yourself as a person… Wasn’t it just a week ago that you were devastated by a golf score?”
That’s the moment. The high from yesterday’s round and the meltdown from last week aren’t opposites. They’re the same condition. The golfer’s self-worth goes up when the score goes down, and crashes when the score goes up. He’s not riding a wave — he’s trapped on a seesaw with his identity on one end and a number on the other.
Johnny doesn’t let him look away from it. He tells the golfer plainly: “You are well on your way to living a life controlled by a score.”
When the Score Becomes the Person
Cook writes that the golfer’s every waking thought was consumed by golf. That golf was what he did, and his golf score and identity had merged so completely that “I had simply become a golf score.” His life was “controlled by your performance and of the opinions of others” — a life that “would be a series of ups and downs, a life consumed by the fear of failure.”
I read those words from my home in Pinehurst, North Carolina — surrounded by golf courses, surrounded by people who love the game — and I didn’t see a golfer. I saw every successful lawyer I’ve ever coached. I saw myself sitting at that desk with the Wilson decision in my hands.
The verdict becomes the attorney. The settlement number becomes the measure of the person. Win, and you’re competent, respected, safe. Lose and something is fundamentally broken — not with the case, but with you.
I call this the External Authority Trap. When outcomes determine your identity, you haven’t built confidence. You’ve built a trapdoor. Every result either props you up or drops you through the floor. And the cruelest part? It doesn’t matter how many times you win. The trapdoor is always there, waiting for the next loss to spring it.
These aren’t struggling lawyers living this way. These are attorneys with decades of wins, managing partners who built their firms from scratch, trial lawyers with records most people would envy — who still can’t shake the feeling that the next loss will expose them. The scoreboard never lets them rest. I know because mine didn’t let me rest for years.
The Lies Every Successful Lawyer Carries But Never Says Out Loud
This is where Chapter 9 takes its most powerful turn. Johnny leads the golfer to a pre-dug grave at the course’s small cemetery. He hands him paper and a pen. And he says something no one had ever said to this golfer before: Write down your lies.
Not your weaknesses. Not your development areas. Your lies. The internal narratives that have been running your life — the stories you’ve told yourself so many times that you forgot they were never true. Inadequacy. Rejection fears. Anger disguised as strength. Success defining identity. The belief that failure in golf is failure in life. That opinions of others are paramount. That success brings fulfillment.
The golfer writes them down, reads them aloud, and buries them in the ground.
Now let me ask you something. If someone handed you a piece of paper and a pen right now — and nobody was watching — what would you write?
I work with successful lawyers every day, and the lies they carry are remarkably consistent. They don’t usually say them out loud. Most have never written them down. But the lies are there, running the show from behind the curtain:
“If I lose this case, it means I’m not good enough.”
“My clients need me available around the clock, or they’ll find someone else.”
“Delegating means risking my reputation.”
“I can’t admit I’m struggling — not at my level.”
“Winning is what makes me valuable. Everything else is secondary.”
“My family understands because they know how important my work is.”
These aren’t truths. They’re lies that got dressed up as professionalism and wore the disguise for so long that everyone — including the attorney — forgot they were lies. They sound reasonable. They sound like dedication. That last one even sounds noble — like a sacrifice your family is honored to make. But underneath, they’re the bars of a prison that no amount of winning can unlock.
One attorney I coach is an incredibly successful lawyer. He’s won many cases. He’s accomplished more for his clients than most attorneys achieve in a lifetime. But he lives in fear — not of losing the case itself, but of what people will think when he loses one. How will they see him? What would they think of him? It shows up in everything he does. He over-prepares obsessively — not because the case demands it, but because he’s trying to prepare his way out of an anxiety that has nothing to do with preparation. He replays conversations with colleagues, looking for signs that they’re doubting him. His entire emotional life orbits around a verdict that hasn’t even happened yet. He’s not preparing for cases. He’s preparing for judgment — and not the kind that comes from a bench.
Why the Burial Works
Johnny’s graveside ritual isn’t theater. It’s built on a principle that most successful lawyers have been avoiding their entire careers: you can’t outperform a lie you haven’t named.
The lies survive precisely because they stay buried — not buried as in dealt with, but buried as in hidden where no one can challenge them. You’ve never written “My worth depends on my win rate” on a piece of paper and stared at it. You’ve never said “I believe I’m only as good as my last verdict” out loud in a room. The lies thrive in the dark. Naming them is what starts to strip their power.
Cook uses a beautiful metaphor within the metaphor here. In golf, a “buried lie” is when your ball is plugged deep in a bunker — half-submerged in sand with no clean angle. The instinct is to be cautious. Dig carefully. Play it safe. But that’s exactly wrong. A buried lie in a bunker demands aggressive commitment forward. You have to visualize the path, feel the club’s bounce slice under the ball, and trust the swing. Tentative doesn’t work. You go through it or you stay stuck.
That’s the attorney who keeps tiptoeing around what’s really going on — reading an article about burnout, nodding along at a wellness CLE, telling themselves they’ll set boundaries after this next case. Always next quarter. Always later. Never through it. A buried lie in a bunker doesn’t care about your intentions. It only responds to committed action.
The same is true for the lies running a successful lawyer’s career. You have to name the lie, confront it, and commit to a different truth.
I had to do this myself. The lie I carried wasn’t abstract — it had a specific moment. It lived in the memory of sitting at my desk with the Wilson ruling in my hands, convinced that the loss proved something permanent about who I was. It didn’t matter that I knew intellectually that every lawyer loses cases. The lie operated below the intellectual level. It lived in my gut, and it ran my emotional life for longer than I’d like to admit. Naming it — really naming it, not just acknowledging it in passing — was the beginning of a different way of practicing law and a different way of living.
What I Found on the Other Side
Johnny tells the golfer that burying the lies is only half the transformation. The other half is replacing them with truth. I want to tell you what that looked like for me, because the burial means nothing if you don’t know what to build in its place.
When I finally named the lie — that losing a case meant I was a failure as a person — and put it down, what replaced it was something I hadn’t felt in years. Freedom. And with it, a confidence I’d never actually experienced before, even during the winning streaks. Because the old confidence was conditional. It depended on the next verdict. The new confidence didn’t.
I was no longer controlled by fear of the outcome and what it would mean for me. Because I knew — not intellectually, but in my bones — that my dedication to my clients, my commitment, my effort is what truly counted. The results didn’t determine who I was. My effort did.
And here’s what surprised me most: I became a better trial lawyer. Not a worse one. More relaxed. More present. More effective. When you’re not spending half your mental energy managing the terror of what a loss will say about you, it turns out you have a lot more of yourself to give to the case and to the client. The fear had been telling me it was protecting me — keeping me sharp, keeping me prepared. That was the final lie. The fear wasn’t fuel. It was weight. And when I set it down, I could finally move.
Significance Over Scores
Standing among the gravestones at the Links of Utopia, Johnny delivers the line that defines the entire chapter: “Life in the end will be measured by significance, not a golf score.”
He forces the golfer to think about what his epitaph would actually say. Not what he hopes it would say. What it would say right now, based on how he’s been living. Will it read of fleeting wins or lasting impact?
This is the question I want every successful lawyer reading this to sit with. Because the legal profession relentlessly reinforces the scoreboard. Am Law rankings. Verdict reports. Deal tombstones. Billable hour targets. Super Lawyers lists. The profession has built an entire infrastructure around keeping score — and nobody in that infrastructure is asking, “But does your work mean something to you beyond whether you won?”
This is where my coaching differs from the wellness conversation happening in the legal profession right now. I’m not talking about work-life balance. I’m not suggesting you take more vacations. And I want to be clear — if you’ve tried meditation apps, mindfulness practices, or stress management techniques, those aren’t bad tools. But if you’ve tried them and still feel the same dread on Sunday night, it’s because those tools treat the symptom. They don’t touch the source. The source is an identity question: Are you a person who practices law, or are you a walking win-loss record?
What Significance Actually Looks Like
I’ve watched what happens when a successful lawyer answers that question honestly.
One managing partner I work with stopped measuring his associates by billable hours and started evaluating them by the quality of their client relationships and their growth as advocates. It didn’t make his firm less successful — it made it more so, because the people in it stopped performing out of fear and started practicing from purpose. That’s what significance looks like in a law firm. Not lower standards. Higher meaning.
In my work with The Free Lawyer® Framework, I guide successful lawyers through three shifts that mirror what happens after the golfer’s burial. The first is from External Authority to Internal Authority — building confidence rooted in your preparation, competence, and character rather than in the verdict. The second is from Perfectionist Performance to Sustainable Excellence — practicing at a high level because you choose to, not because you’re terrified of what happens if you don’t. The third is from Compulsive Work to Conscious Choice — redesigning your practice to reflect your values rather than someone else’s expectations of you.
These shifts are the lawyer’s version of what the golfer experiences walking away from that grave. Once the lies are in the ground, you have to decide what you’re going to build in their place. The answer is significance. Purpose. A practice that reflects who you actually are rather than what the scoreboard demands.
What Would You Bury?
Cook’s buried lies ritual didn’t stay in the pages of his book. Thousands of readers have emailed their own lies to be buried at the Links of Utopia cemetery in that tiny Texas town. The practice has inspired retreats, speaking events, and countless personal transformations. It works because confrontation is the first step toward freedom — and most people have never been given permission to confront what’s been controlling them.
So here’s my question for you: What’s the lie that’s been running your career? The one you’ve never said out loud because saying it would make it real? The one that turns a single loss into proof that you’re a fraud, no matter how many wins came before it?
I carried that lie for years. It nearly cost me everything that actually mattered. Naming it — burying it — didn’t make me a worse lawyer. It made me a free one. And the career got better, not worse, when I stopped letting a scoreboard tell me who I was.
The grave is dug. The pen is in your hand. What would you write?
If this chapter hit home the way it hit home for me, I’d love to hear from you. You can find me at www.garymiles.net, reach me at gary@garymiles.net, or listen to The Free Lawyer podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’re ready to start burying the lies that have been running your practice, let’s have a conversation about what freedom could look like for you.