“You can pretend to be happy if you want to,” Joey Bishop once told a reporter with characteristic bluntness. “I’m a worrier by nature,” he confessed to another. “No worrier is ever good-humored. I don’t know if a worrier ever is happy.” The comedian, known as the “Frown Prince” of Frank Sinatra’s legendary Rat Pack, understood something profound about human nature that extends far beyond the glittering stages of 1960s Las Vegas: worry is the tax we pay on tomorrow’s troubles, and it compounds daily when we try to shoulder burdens we were never meant to carry alone.
Bishop’s candid admission about his worrying nature reveals a fundamental truth about the human condition. We are creatures perpetually anxious about the future, constantly calculating risks, anticipating problems, and losing sleep over scenarios that may never materialize. This tendency toward worry, while evolutionarily adaptive, becomes counterproductive when it prevents us from focusing on what we do best. The solution, as any wise person eventually discovers, lies not in pretending our worries don’t exist, but in strategically delegating them to those better equipped to handle them.
Enter the profound wisdom of retaining excellent professional advisors—particularly a skilled lawyer and a competent accountant. These professionals represent more than mere service providers; they are the guardians of our peace of mind, the sentries who stand watch over the complex legal and financial landscapes that surround our daily lives. When we engage their services, we are not simply purchasing expertise; we are buying back our mental bandwidth, reclaiming the cognitive resources that worry would otherwise consume.
Consider the lawyer first. In our increasingly litigious society, legal exposure lurks around every corner like shadows in a film noir. Contracts, regulations, liability issues, intellectual property concerns, employment law, real estate transactions—the list of potential legal pitfalls grows longer each year. The average person attempting to navigate these waters alone is like Joey Bishop trying to perform surgery: well-intentioned, perhaps, but woefully unprepared for the complexity of the task. A good lawyer doesn’t just provide legal advice; they provide the invaluable service of professional worry. They lie awake at night thinking about statute of limitations, regulatory changes, and potential liabilities so that you don’t have to.
The accountant serves a similar function in the financial realm. Tax codes change with bewildering frequency, financial regulations multiply like rabbits, and the consequences of errors can be devastating. While you’re focused on running your business, pursuing your career, or simply living your life, your accountant is monitoring the shifting landscape of financial obligations and opportunities. They worry about quarterly payments, deduction strategies, audit risks, and compliance requirements with the focused intensity that these matters deserve—and that you cannot afford to provide while maintaining your sanity and productivity.
The Rat Pack era that Joey Bishop inhabited offers an interesting parallel to our modern predicament. Those entertainers lived in a world of contracts, royalties, tax implications, and legal complexities that would have overwhelmed them had they tried to manage everything personally. Sinatra, Martin, Davis, Lawford, and Bishop could focus on their craft—the singing, the acting, the comedy that made them legends—precisely because they had teams of professionals handling the business side of their careers. They understood intuitively what many of us resist: that trying to be an expert at everything is a recipe for being mediocre at most things.
The philosophical principle at work here is one of comparative advantage, borrowed from economics but applicable to life management. You have unique talents, skills, and interests that generate value in the world. Every hour you spend wrestling with legal documents or tax forms is an hour not spent developing those talents, pursuing those interests, or creating that value. It’s an inefficient allocation of your most precious resource: time.
Moreover, there’s a psychological dimension to professional delegation that Bishop’s quote illuminates perfectly. Worry is not just unproductive; it’s actively destructive to happiness and performance. When we attempt to manage complex legal and financial matters beyond our expertise, we don’t just risk making costly mistakes—we guarantee ourselves sleepless nights and anxious days. The peace of mind that comes from knowing qualified professionals are handling these matters is worth far more than their fees.
The key, of course, lies in finding truly good advisors. A mediocre lawyer or accountant can create more problems than they solve, adding to your worries rather than alleviating them. But when you find professionals who are genuinely skilled, ethical, and attentive to your needs, you’ve discovered something precious: the ability to sleep soundly knowing that competent hands are managing the complexities that would otherwise consume your thoughts.
Joey Bishop may have been a worrier by nature, but he was also wise enough to surround himself with professionals who could handle the business complexities of show business. In doing so, he freed himself to focus on what he did best: making people laugh and crafting the material that made the Rat Pack legendary. The lesson for the rest of us is clear: let the lawyers worry about the law, let the accountants worry about the numbers, and let yourself focus on living the life you were meant to live. After all, as Bishop might have said, life’s too short to spend it worrying about things other people can worry about better than you can.