We got one here from Andrew, writing all the way from Australia. He says, "Morning, Cal. I started my PhD late last year, and stumbling on your books and podcasts has helped me focus and work deeper. I love trail running and doing Ironmans, but I'm struggling to permit myself to continue training and competing in these while undertaking the biggest deep work of my life so far, my PhD.

Can I do both or should I just focus on the PhD?" Andrew, I think you should do both. Do not inflate the PhD in your mind to be this incredibly difficult hell week at Navy Seal training, you know, taking the beach at Normandy type of massive trial that some people do and say, this is, you know, a relatively easy job.

I have some classes and the classes are done, and then I'm mainly focused on research and research is hard, but it only takes up so much of your time each day. So I say do the hardcore athletic training, if anything is going to help balance you out so that when you get worn out intellectually, your confidence gets shaken.

Oh man, I'm not getting this. My paper got rejected. You have something else to do. And so do those two things. For most programs, again, a PhD program is not this huge life consuming type of position. I know this in part because when I was writing about student stuff, PhD student myself, and I was writing about a lot of student stuff, I had noticed there was this disturbing subculture of people at this point, largely blogging, sort of pre-social media, blogging about life as a grad student.

And they would inflate it into this like terrible thing that was the hardest burden that anyone would ever do. And these things had titles like dissertation hell, and you would read these things and you would think, you would think that these students had been deployed to war torn countries in which they had to run life threatening commando raids through terrible conditions or something like this.

And what I finally figured out was happening is that being a doctoral student, A, is a really weird job. It's not like a normal job. There's big periods where you don't have much to do or the things you do is non-standard. It's not people giving you tasks to accomplish.

You don't have a nine to five schedule that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Like, is this really a job I have? So by inflating it to be this big hard thing, I think it somehow helps people counter that feeling of like, I don't really have a real job.

So I thought that was part of it. Another part of it is there is an anxiety or intellectual insecurity that a lot of people rightly would suffer from. When I say rightly, I mean it's justified because it's a weird world. It's a job that's all about your brain and people posturing who's smarter and it helps you feel better.

I can justify this anxiety I'm feeling about intellectual issues, like can I keep up or whatever, by just describing what I'm going through as this big, terrible thing in general. And then your anxiety makes sense. But I'm going to say resist that. It's a pretty easy job. Pretty easy job.

And again, I wrote two, I wrote two books during my PhD, two books during my PhD that had nothing to do with my PhD, just as something to do on the side. And I ran study hacks where we were doing three posts a week back then. And I was still bored because it's kind of a fake job.

So Andrew, keep training for Ironman at the same time.