“My mother had taken a break from college when she was young and then didn’t go back until I was in elementary school,” Jackie Cohen said on this week’s Drinks With The Deal podcast in discussing her career moves. “She regretted not having more of a career path earlier in her life. So I think I had been taught you have to you have to do what you think is going to make you happy, and you can’t you can’t be afraid to make big decisions.”

“One of the other things my early work experience taught me is that I can try anything, I can fail at some things, I can try something else. I wasn’t afraid to make big decisions. I just made them, and I knew that I would find a way to make it work.”

Cohen, now an M&A partner at Ropes & Gray LLP in New York, took breaks from practicing law to spend a stint in-house at Morgan Stanley and to run a yarn store in Pleasantville, N.Y.

She enjoyed running a small business and learned from the experience, but, she said, she missed the relationship she had with her clients as a lawyer.

“They come to you because they have a really complicated problem that they need somebody to help them solve. I really liked being that person, and I missed being that person. That is why I went back to practicing law.”

Listen to the podcast with Jackie Cohen below:

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