Delphic Maxim 92: Finish the race without shrinking back
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
92. Finish the race without shrinking back
For about 5 years now, I’ve been working on a PhD.
A lot of people seem to think that doing a PhD means that you are really, really smart — I don’t think this is actually the case. Sure, you need to know a little bit about the subject you are interested in, but that’s kind of foundational knowledge for the project that follows. You can pick that up anywhere — and it’s possible to do a PhD on literally anything, it’s not just a ‘big academic thing’. A PhD is a learning experience, you start it with an area of interest you’d like to know more about, and then off you go.
The thing that a PhD student requires, then, isn’t massive smarts — it’s massive persistence. You have to be interested in learning, you have to have a topic you’re interested in exploring, and you have to have the motivation and drive to stick with it for what can be a long period of time. You plant the seed and grow the tree. It’s literally a tree you’re growing, too, because by the end of the process this thing looks giant.
When Australian Idol was first on TV and Marcia Hines was a judge, she offered advice to one of the nervous performers: “you’re only as good as your last performance, so finish it.” I love that quote (I really love that it comes from somewhere as unexpected as Australian Idol), and I tell it to my students all the time. It helps me to remind myself why I’m in this long, slow project. When I get scared because I’m doing my PhD part-time and I see so many friends and colleagues completing theirs and I wonder if I will ever finish mine, I remind myself that the performance is currently playing, and I just have to finish it.
Today’s maxim is about confidence in self, but also the importance of being persistent. It isn’t about winning — I think that the ancients were perhaps clever enough to realise that obsession with winning, or with being the best, is a bit of a fools errand. Better to improve the self day by day — to run your own race, if you want a fairly trite euphemism — than to waste time competing with other people. After all, we are improved by our communal life — the more we work with other people, the more we give and the more we share and receive from our communities, the better off we all are.
People are actually more capable of growth and achievement than they realise. There are a whole bunch of cognitive and emotional limits we place on ourselves, in part because our body naturally protects us from hurting ourselves, and in part because we are biologically conditioned to operate within comfortable restraints. Pushing ourselves to complete tough challenges is hard, but the stress of the experience is where all the growth happens. It’s what Nassim Taleb talks about with his intense workouts and Black Swan approach to life. It’s what educational theorist Lev Vygotsky means when he talks about the zone of proximal development: there’s a space beyond our current ability, a zone in which we feel uncomfortable, but if we stick at it, that’s where the learning happens.
So I carry on with my PhD race. Only a year or so left, I hope. Regardless, I’ll finish it, and the delightful paradox is that the longer I run, the better, stronger, more developed the end will be.
