Everybody needs to win sometimes

Small wins are like kindle to a flame. It feeds into your pride and happiness, and keeps you going a long way.

I’ve always thought of a PhD program as a long-term investment. You put your money, your time, and efforts in it with the hope that several years from now it will generate benefits, be it a new job, better incomes, or even a settlement opportunity. Like any other investment, before you decide this is something that is worth investing in, you have to make sure all the benefits outweigh the costs for you personally, because otherwise, why else would you do that to yourself? However, because it’s a long-term investment, and a big one at that, you can’t expect to yield benefits right from the start. In fact, most of the good things about a PhD program only come about in the half end of it—the conferences, the papers, the degree. At the beginning, you have to be ready to accept quite a lot of losses.

Perseverance

[noun] persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success.

From a realistic perspective, like any other jobs, the PhD has a learning curve, which could be quite steep at the end but painstakingly flat at the beginning. I always imagined if finishing a PhD thesis is 100% amount of work, then if you’re undertaking your PhD in 3 years, you should expect to complete 33.3% of work in every year. But that’s an unrealistic expectation, especially if you’re an outsider stepping into the academic world. There is a huge amount of new knowledge and skills you have to learn before you can actually do something for your thesis. Therefore, the first year of a PhD is when your perseverance will be tested most fiercely. You can go for months on end without actually achieving anything. There are no big wins or small wins whatsoever.

This is particularly hard for me. At my old job, the longest a project could take was 3 months, and even though in those 3 months I might be busting my arse off trying to meet the deadlines, the end was always in sight. Plus, I always had all kinds of measure to help me assess where I was in terms of project completion. And my lord how sweet were the winnings when the project was finally finished. It felt like the whole world was off my shoulders, and I could totally relax for a few days before the cycle began again. My whole body and mentality have been used to that pace of work, so when the 3 months mark of the PhD program was approaching, I started to get exhausted, both physically and mentally. That was when I knew I had to do something to keep the fire in me from burning out.

Now, because doing a PhD is a long-term investment, let’s come back to an old cliché quote about investment that seems to work wonder for me during these months.

“Don’t Put All your Eggs in One Basket.”

It means, whatever bankroll you have, be it time bank or money bank, or mental and physical strength bank, do not put it all in your PhD project, otherwise you bear the risk of losing everything before you can start to earn some rewards back.

It also means realising that the PhD is not your whole life, and you need to set aside a portion of your life for other things that matter to you. So that instead of being overly reliant on one source of winning opportunities (i.e. your PhD), you can now create other instances where you can enjoy the pleasure of winning outside of the academic world.

For me, it means putting some of my eggs into some long time abandoned hobby baskets. For example, I have made a commitment with myself, that no matter how busy I am, I will spend at least 5 hours a week on my new blog. That way, I don’t have to rely solely on the rare psychologically winning moments from my PhD project, because I already create these winning moments for myself—whether it’s a new blog post, a new post format, a new feature or a new subscriber.

There are plenty of other baskets that I’m starting to filling up again—yoga, baking, cooking. And you know what, I started to notice B-I-G changes in my mental and physical health. Most importantly, I’ve felt like I’m alive again, instead of just being a ghost of my old self, limiting the meaning of my life to the idea of a PhD degree which I haven’t even held yet, and belittling my self-esteem with a sense of unbearable impotence.

So, if you are feeling depleted from your PhD, I’d encourage you to ask yourself which baskets of yours are being empty, and which winning opportunities you are overlooking. Are you in this for the long haul?