All right, moving on. We got a question here from Andrew. Andrew says, I'm starting a PhD. How would you approach a PhD knowing what you know now regarding deep work, et cetera? Andrew, assuming you're looking for an academic job, assuming that's why you're doing a PhD, care a lot more about the research topic right now.

When you're very new, you've got to think, where is there heat right now just beginning to emerge in my field? And I want to be working on something like that with the best possible people who are helping to develop that field. I underestimated this, I would say, in my PhD program.

I didn't think about it. I just said, I'll deal with the job market when I deal with the job market. But really what you want to be doing, if your goal is to get an academic job, is to say, I want to align myself with someone who's doing something very hot right now.

Because here's what's going to happen when I enter the job market. They're going to say, we want whatever your advisor's name is. And then the response will be, well, she's not available. She already has a job. They'll say, all right, well, can we get basically like a clone of this person who also knows how to do that work?

Like, great, who is her student? Let's get that person instead. That's where the really good job offers come from. That's what opens up options. So care a lot about what research you're working on. And then get in the habit of working on research every single day. I'm going to suggest the first three hours of every day.

The first three hours of every day, you're reading stuff relevant to a paper, article, or essay you want to write, or you're directly writing a paper, article, or essay. So three hours a day, every day, you're always doing work. That adds up. Produce, produce, produce. OK, so align yourself with the hottest topic you can.

Someone who's doing great work on a field that's emerging really makes such a difference. We really underplay topic. Research topic is so important on the job market. It's not just, here's a generic talent. It's like, we're hiring for this topic. And then B, three hours, three hours every day.

And also, in your writing, don't do what I just did, which was enumerated one, followed by B. That's the type of stuff that's not going to go well in your article for whatever academic journal. All right. He's getting his PhD in film studies. Yeah. And I was wondering what your thoughts on even on that film study kick with books and stuff.

Yeah. Do a lot of people have PhDs in film studies? No, but it's a department at a lot of universities, but not every university. So it's not as widespread as English or something. But film studies is a great example. I mean, basically, in film studies, you need to be aligning yourself with an emerging framework or critique that seems to have a lot of heat around it, is what I would say.

And then you need to start reading all that and writing in that as early as possible. Align yourself with someone who's doing really great work with that new framework or type of critique and master it. And you've got to be doing reviews and essays pretty early on, is what I would say.

Yeah, film studies would be cool. Yeah, I read that textbook. It's a complicated field, man. Yeah, that's why I was curious. Yeah, it's all complicated. I mean, it's like any other field, I think, right now. So there's theoretical frameworks that get popular, and then they infuse lots of different fields.

Like film studies is very susceptible to that. So whatever is big at the time-- so if we were talking 15 years ago, you're going to get a lot of post-colonial theory or queer theory. And now there's a lot more specifically postmodern critical theory subsets that are really injecting themselves through film study.

So probably what you should do in film studies is look to an emerging theoretical framework that's generating a lot of heat in another major field that hasn't yet made it to film studies or is just making it there, and then be one of the people that helps usher it in.

That's a pretty sure path to academic jobs. All right, Andrew. (upbeat music)