We are not ready and never will be

Two years ago, I got a chance to speak with one Ph.D. final year student. It was not kind of a professional talk, just a casual one. He was a productive guy, finding new interesting skills and learning them. One fascinating behavior with him was he approach things differently. On the very day of the talk with him, he sent a mail, in which he was mentioning about doing things differently- “Smart people do things differently”. Today I happened to open that mail, not intentionally. Now being a Ph.D. student, I can feel the inner meaning of what those words exactly mean. 

 

Doing research is easy but doing worthy research is hard. Creativity plays an influential role in research and it comes with critical thinking. We have to think critically and think out of the box. ‘Giovanni Corazza’, founder of the Marconi Institute of Creativity in one of his TEDx Talk said “Serendipity happens all the time, we just need to have the eyes to see it.” It is easy to tell but hard to implement. We need a lot of practice to do it. Critical thinking involves asking appropriate questions to form a meaningful story. The questions involve: ‘what’, ‘Who’, ‘where’, ‘when’, ‘how’, ‘why’, ‘what if’, ‘what next, ‘so what’. These questions help to fulfil the vital functions of a study - description, analysis, and evaluation.

 

Doing things differently needs different skill sets. So, it is important to improve the skills. We can’t learn all the skills overnight; it needs patience and perseverance. One book I read during this lockdown was ‘Atomic Habits by James Clear’. In that book, he says about learning new kinds of stuff and improving ourselves by 1% every day. He was mentioning the “Compound Effect”-small improvements for a longer period. There is an interesting story describing the power of the compound effect- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71yuH365Rug. 

 

One last idea I want to share is why am I writing these? The simple answer is we “live” when we shift to a producer from a consumer. Still, after knowing this answer, I was waiting for the right opportunity, thinking that I am not ready, till I read a quote by ‘Timothy Ferriss’, in his book ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’. It says – “For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn't conspire against you, but it doesn't go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. "Someday" is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it's important to you and you want to do it "eventually," just do it and correct course along the way.” This quote gave me the insight that “We are not ready and never will be”. So, if you want to do something do it at the earliest.