All right, I think we have time for one more question. This one is from Nicholas, who prefaces the question by saying, not sure if you want to answer this. Nicholas, I will try to answer this. You ask, which habits are needed to be an MVP in the academic world?

That's a good question, Nicholas. Adderall and lying? Is that what I wasn't supposed to say? No, it's OK. The formula is not super complicated. If you want to be a star academic, there's three things that are preconditions. They're not sufficient. This won't necessarily get you there, but they're necessary.

So at the very least, you'll have to do these three things. And typically, it's A, read. And by read, I mean you do the work to keep up with the latest literature in your particular specialty. If you're a theoretician, you are reading what people are doing in the topics you study and mastering their techniques.

If you're a lab scientist, you're looking at the innovations in lab scientist techniques, and you're learning from it. This is really hard work. Reading academic papers is hard. Trying to figure out what academics is doing is hard. The top people spend a lot of time on this. Two, you're working relentlessly.

You're always working on research, carefully chosen projects. You're always working on it at a faster pace than other people. And when you finish one thing, you move on to the next. The total number of hours top academics put into their research is typically much bigger than their peers, where it's more seasonal.

They're working on something. They kind of do other things for a while, and they work on it. Star academics are relentless about it. It's priority one. They try to fit in the other stuff, the teaching, the whatever, when they can. But the time is going to be on the research.

And then three, you attach yourselves to stars. If you want to produce MVP caliber work, you have to be training under MVP caliber people. It's very consistent. It's very difficult to break up to a higher level than you studied under. It typically goes the other way. There's a reason why star academics are stars.

You have to learn from them how they do it, how they work, what they focus on, their techniques, their work ethic. So you have to work with the very best people. Now, you could do those three things and not end up a star. There's raw brainpower and luck play a big role in this.

I mean, especially in mathematical fields or other types of fields, there's just horsepower that matters. And I don't know how you develop it and how much of it you're born with and how much of it is the training you've done throughout your whole life or whatever, but there's a certain just type of ability to do spatial reasoning or internal numerical manipulations.

And that's just you probably have to have, and some people don't. And then there's this luck. The topic you're working on works. You can't always predict that. But you're working on, let's say it's 2018. You're starting a postdoc. You're going to do a postdoc at wherever. And what I'm going to focus on is the phenotypic expressions of coronavirus genotype point mutations.

And then the coronavirus pandemic comes. Wow, you're going to get a lot of grant money. You're going to get a lot of demand. What you're doing is really, really useful. This would be a really good time. Whereas at the same time, if in 2019, you were an epi professor at Johns Hopkins that had just published your first book, which was A World Without Viruses, why we will never again face a big pandemic because of the miracles of modern technology and the ability for populations to react nimbly and quickly.

Now you're in a bad place. You're not going to do as well. So there is luck involved as well. But those are the necessary. Like at the very least, you have to be mastering the literature, working relentlessly, and working with stars. And it's a focused, intense, deep work effort every day, reasonable amount.

You could probably do four hours of this a day and just repeat, repeat, repeat. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)