All right, we have a question here from Mr. Academia. He asks, "As a computer scientist, are you so good you can't be ignored? And if not, does it bother you?" Well, you know, it's a hard question. It does bother me. But it's a hard question, because in any field with an elite competitive structure, the question of what is good is a squirrely one, because there is almost always levels above whatever you grab, whatever you fix, as this is good.

It's all super relative. It really depends who you fix to. So I don't know the answer to this question. It depends who you anchor to. So let me give you both arguments. Let me give you the argument that, "No, I'm not." The argument, "No, I'm not," is, well, look, you're not at a top 10 computer science department.

There is no major theorem that has been solved that has your name on it. That's true. In recent years during the pandemic, your publication dried up. You wouldn't see that with a really top computer scientist. You had other things going on, and that kind of dried up. There are certain very competitive grants that I don't have.

I don't have an NSF career grant. So I could make an argument pretty quickly that I'm a bust. Now let me go the other way. Let me go the other way. Look, you came out of Dartmouth sort of guns blazing, A's in everything, went to MIT, like the number one place in the world, breezed through your doctorate there, got A's in all of your classes, were publishing left and right at MIT, got a really good tenure track academic job at a top 25 US university in sort of exactly the narrow geographic band in which you wanted to live.

Once at that university, you published a lot, you got tenure early, you went up for tenure after just four years, you were named a Provost Distinguished Associate Professor Scholar, you have 70 peer-reviewed papers and over 3,000 citations on those papers, an H-index of 30. Compared to most people who study computer science, "Oh, you're a tenured professor who has all these publications." Both of those things could be true.

Those are both accurate assessments I gave. So honestly, it really depends on the day whether I feel really good or really bad. If I'm hanging out with some of my old MIT buds that are just killing it, I feel essentially like I'm a fourth grader who wandered into the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos.

But then other times I'm around my students or this or that, and I'm like, "Oh yeah, look at all these ideas I came up with, these theorems that I cracked, these new techniques, these NSF grants I've gotten, and I feel really good." So it's really hard. It's really hard in fields with elite competitive structures.

And so it just goes back and forth. The same thing with writing. I mean, I could do the same thing with writing. Depends on the day. I have friends who have sold book amounts that boggle the mind, like more than, well, not more than, say eight figures, eight figures worth of books, right?

Lots of books. Made a fortune. And I have friends who are award-winning, notable book, major awards, including at least one Pulitzer winner. So I can look there and be like, "What the hell am I doing as a writer? I'm nothing. I'm nobody." Or I could look the other way and be like, "Hey, I have seven books and write for The New Yorker and a bunch of New York Times bestsellers.

And I make a lot of best of the year lists. Those aren't easy to make. I think email will be on the Times of London's best of the year list. It's on the Financial Times best of the year list. It's on Amazon's best of the year list. Like, hey, I'm writing books that sell a ton of copies, relatively speaking, and are on best of year books." Or then I look over here and say, "They don't have a Pulitzer and it didn't sell 10 million copies, so it's nothing." So I guess my point here, Mr.

Academia, is that it all just depends what you're measuring against. So probably the right strategy is to stop trying to actually get a definitive answer and shift over, like I try to do on my good days, towards lifestyle-centric, value-driven career planning. This is what I want my life to be like.

These are the things I value. I value the craft of writing. I value the craft of the computer science I do. Here's what I want my life to be like. And try to get as much satisfaction as I can out of the execution of this plan, of the realization of this idealized lifestyle, and try less to put myself up on a scoreboard and say, "I just fell from seven to nine.

Now I'm upset." I don't succeed in that mindset shift all the time, but it's what I try to do.