How Do I Balance Deep Work and Personal Pursuits?

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00:00:05.200 | We got one here from Andrew, writing all the way from Australia.

00:00:10.640 | He says, "Morning, Cal. I started my PhD late last year,

00:00:15.360 | and stumbling on your books and podcasts has helped me focus and work deeper.

00:00:19.800 | I love trail running and doing Ironmans,

00:00:22.360 | but I'm struggling to permit myself to continue training and competing in these

00:00:26.400 | while undertaking the biggest deep work of my life so far, my PhD.

00:00:31.280 | Can I do both or should I just focus on the PhD?"

00:00:34.560 | Andrew, I think you should do both.

00:00:36.840 | Do not inflate the PhD in your

00:00:42.520 | mind to be this incredibly difficult hell week at Navy

00:00:47.640 | Seal training, you know,

00:00:49.840 | taking the beach at Normandy type of massive trial that

00:00:54.600 | some people do and say, this is, you know, a relatively easy job.

00:00:58.800 | I have some classes and the classes are done,

00:01:01.400 | and then I'm mainly focused on research and research is hard,

00:01:03.480 | but it only takes up so much of your time each day.

00:01:05.440 | So I say do the hardcore athletic training,

00:01:08.000 | if anything is going to help balance you out so that when you get worn out

00:01:11.880 | intellectually, your confidence gets shaken. Oh man,

00:01:15.960 | I'm not getting this. My paper got rejected. You have something else to do.

00:01:18.800 | And so do those two things. For most programs, again,

00:01:23.000 | a PhD program is not this huge life consuming type of position.

00:01:28.280 | I know this in part because when I was writing about student stuff,

00:01:32.480 | PhD student myself, and I was writing about a lot of student stuff,

00:01:35.560 | I had noticed there was this disturbing subculture of people at this point,

00:01:40.880 | largely blogging, sort of pre-social media,

00:01:44.120 | blogging about life as a grad student.

00:01:48.040 | And they would inflate it into this like terrible thing that was the hardest

00:01:52.840 | burden that anyone would ever do.

00:01:54.840 | And these things had titles like dissertation hell,

00:01:58.240 | and you would read these things and you would think,

00:01:59.960 | you would think that these students had been deployed to war torn countries in

00:02:06.400 | which they had to run life threatening commando raids through terrible

00:02:12.920 | conditions or something like this.

00:02:14.080 | And what I finally figured out was happening is that being a doctoral student,

00:02:18.000 | A, is a really weird job. It's not like a normal job.

00:02:21.120 | There's big periods where you don't have much to do or the things you do is

00:02:25.560 | non-standard. It's not people giving you tasks to accomplish.

00:02:29.080 | You don't have a nine to five schedule that makes a lot of people uncomfortable.

00:02:33.080 | Like, is this really a job I have?

00:02:34.720 | So by inflating it to be this big hard thing,

00:02:37.400 | I think it somehow helps people counter that feeling of like,

00:02:41.520 | I don't really have a real job. So I thought that was part of it.

00:02:44.840 | Another part of it is there is an anxiety or intellectual insecurity that a lot

00:02:48.640 | of people rightly would suffer from. When I say rightly,

00:02:52.040 | I mean it's justified because it's a weird world.

00:02:53.920 | It's a job that's all about your brain and people posturing who's smarter and

00:02:58.800 | it helps you feel better.

00:03:00.760 | I can justify this anxiety I'm feeling about intellectual issues,

00:03:05.640 | like can I keep up or whatever,

00:03:07.120 | by just describing what I'm going through as this big,

00:03:10.920 | terrible thing in general. And then your anxiety makes sense.

00:03:14.080 | But I'm going to say resist that. It's a pretty easy job.

00:03:19.080 | Pretty easy job. And again, I wrote

00:03:21.440 | two, I wrote two books during my PhD,

00:03:26.160 | two books during my PhD that had nothing to do with my PhD,

00:03:29.760 | just as something to do on the side.

00:03:31.800 | And I ran study hacks where we were doing three posts a week back then.

00:03:35.080 | And I was still bored because it's kind of a fake job.

00:03:37.600 | So Andrew, keep training for Ironman at the same time.

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How Do I Balance Deep Work and Personal Pursuits?

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