pressure

Against “doing your best”

pnrj heuristics and biases, personal , , , , ,

Oct 3 JDN 2459491

It’s an appealing sentiment: Since we all have different skill levels, rather than be held to some constant standard which may be easy for some but hard for others, we should each do our best. This will ensure that we achieve the best possible outcome.

Yet it turns out that this advice is not so easy to follow: What is “your best”?

Is your best the theoretical ideal of what your performance could be if all obstacles were removed and you worked at your greatest possible potential? Then no one in history has ever done their best, and when people get close, they usually end up winning Nobel Prizes.

Is your best the performance you could attain if you pushed yourself to your limit, ignored all pain and fatigue, and forced yourself to work at maximum effort until you literally can’t anymore? Then doing your best doesn’t sound like such a great thing anymore—and you’re certainly not going to be able to do it all the time.

Is your best the performance you would attain by continuing to work at your usual level of effort? Then how is that “your best”? Is it the best you could attain if you work at a level of effort that is considered standard or normative? Is it the best you could do under some constraint limiting the amount of pain or fatigue you are willing to bear? If so, what constraint?

How does “your best” change under different circumstances? Does it become less demanding when you are sick, or when you have a migraine? What if you’re depressed? What if you’re simply not feeling motivated? What if you can’t tell whether this demotivation is a special circumstance, a depression system, a random fluctuation, or a failure to motivate yourself?

There’s another problem: Sometimes you really aren’t good at something.

A certain fraction of performance in most tasks is attributable to something we might call “innate talent”; be it truly genetic or fixed by your early environment, it nevertheless is something that as an adult you are basically powerless to change. Yes, you could always train and practice more, and your performance would thereby improve. But it can only improve so much; you are constrained by your innate talent or lack thereof. No amount of training effort will ever allow me to reach the basketball performance of Michael Jordan, the painting skill of Leonardo Da Vinci, or the mathematical insight of Leonhard Euler. (Of the three, only the third is even visible from my current horizon. As someone with considerable talent and training in mathematics, I can at least imagine what it would be like to be as good as Euler—though I surely never will be. I can do most of the mathematical methods that Euler was famous for; but could I have invented them?)

In fact it’s worse than this; there are levels of performance that would be theoretically possible for someone of your level of talent, yet would be so costly to obtain as to be clearly not worth it. Maybe, after all, there is some way I could become as good a mathematician as Euler—but if it would require me to work 16-hour days doing nothing but studying mathematics for the rest of my life, I am quite unwilling to do so.

With this in mind, what would it mean for me to “do my best” in mathematics? To commit those 16-hour days for the next 30 years and win my Fields Medal—if it doesn’t kill me first? If that’s not what we mean by “my best”, then what do we mean, after all?

Perhaps we should simply abandon the concept, and ask instead what successful people actually do.

This will of course depend on what they were successful at; the behavior of basketball superstars is considerably different from the behavior of Nobel Laureate physicists, which is in turn considerably different from the behavior of billionaire CEOs. But in theory we could each decide for ourselves which kind of success we actually would desire to emulate.

Another pitfall to avoid is looking only at superstars and not comparing them with a suitable control group. Every Nobel Laureate physicist eats food and breathes oxygen, but eating food and breathing oxygen will not automatically give you good odds of winning a Nobel (though I guess your odds are in fact a lot better relative to not doing them!). It is likely that many of the things we observe successful people doing—even less trivial things, like working hard and taking big risks—are in fact the sort of thing that a great many people do with far less success.

Upon making such a comparison, one of the first things that we would notice is that the vast majority of highly-successful people were born with a great deal of privilege. Most of them were born rich or at least upper-middle-class; nearly all of them were born healthy without major disabilities. Yes, there are exceptions to any particular form of privilege, and even particularly exceptional individuals who attained superstar status with more headwinds than tailwinds; but the overwhelming pattern is that people who get home runs in life tend to be people who started the game on third base.

But setting that aside, or recalibrating one’s expectations to try to attain a level of success often achieved by people with roughly the same level of privilege as oneself, we must ask: How often? Should you aspire to the median? The top 20%? The top 10%? The top 1%? And what is your proper comparison group? Should I be comparing against Americans, White male Americans, economists, queer economists, people with depression and chronic migraines, or White/Native American male queer economists with depression and chronic migraines who are American expatriates in Scotland? Make the criteria too narrow, and there won’t be many left in your sample. Make them instead too broad, and you’ll include people with very different circumstances who may not be a fair comparison. Perhaps some sort of weighted average of different groups could work—but with what weighting?

Or maybe it’s right to compare against a very broad group, since this is what ultimately decides our life prospects. What it would take to write the best novel you (or someone “like you” in whatever sense that means) can write may not be the relevant question: What you really needed to know was how likely it is that you could make a living as a novelist.


The depressing truth in such a broad comparison is that you may in fact find yourself faced with so many obstacles that there is no realistic path toward the level of success you were hoping for. If you are reading this, I doubt matters are so dire for you that you’re at serious risk of being homeless and starving—but there definitely are people in this world, millions of people, for whom that is not simply a risk but very likely the best they can hope for.

The question I think we are really trying to ask is this: What is the right standard to hold ourselves against?

Unfortunately, I don’t have a clear answer to this question. I have always been an extremely ambitious individual, and I have inclined toward comparisons with the whole world, or with the superstars of my own fields. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that I have consistently failed to live up to my own expectations for my own achievement—even as I surpass what many others expected for me, and have long-since left behind what most people expect for themselves and each other.

I would thus not exactly recommend my own standards. Yet I also can’t quite bear to abandon them, out of a deep-seated fear that it is only by holding myself to the patently unreasonable standard of trying to be the next Einstein or Schrodinger or Keynes or Nash that I have even managed what meager achievements I have made thus far.

Of course this could be entirely wrong: Perhaps I’d have achieved just as much if I held myself to a lower standard—or I could even have achieved more, by avoiding the pain and stress of continually failing to achieve such unattainable heights. But I also can’t rule out the possibility that it is true. I have no control group.

In general, what I think I want to say is this: Don’t try to do your best. You have no idea what your best is. Instead, try to find the highest standard you can consistently meet.

If you really want grad students to have better mental health, remove all the high-stakes checkpoints

pnrj education, ethics, heuristics and biases, personal, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Post 260: Oct 14 JDN 2458406

A study was recently published in Nature Biotechnology showing clear evidence of a mental health crisis among graduate students (no, I don’t know why they picked the biotechnology imprint—I guess it wasn’t good enough for Nature proper?). This is only the most recent of several studies showing exceptionally high rates of mental health issues among graduate students.

I’ve seen universities do a lot of public hand-wringing and lip service about this issue—but I haven’t seen any that were seriously willing to do what it takes to actually solve the problem.

I think this fact became clearest to me when I was required to fill out an official “Individual Development Plan” form as a prerequisite for my advancement to candidacy, which included one question about “What are you doing to support your own mental health and work/life balance?”

The irony here is absolutely excruciating, because advancement to candidacy has been overwhelmingly my leading source of mental health stress for at least the last six months. And it is only one of several different high-stakes checkpoints that grad students are expected to complete, always threatened with defunding or outright expulsion from the graduate program if the checkpoint is not met by a certain arbitrary deadline.

The first of these was the qualifying exams. Then comes advancement to candidacy. Then I have to complete and defend a second-year paper, then a third-year paper. Finally I have to complete and defend a dissertation, and then go onto the job market and go through a gauntlet of applications and interviews. I can’t think of any other time in my life when I was under this much academic and career pressure this consistently—even finishing high school and applying to college wasn’t like this.

If universities really wanted to improve my mental health, they would find a way to get rid of all that.

Granted, a single university does not have total control over all this: There are coordination problems between universities regarding qualifying exams, advancement, and dissertation requirements. One university that unilaterally tried to remove all these would rapidly lose prestige, as it would not be regarded as “rigorous” to reduce the pressure on your grad students. But that itself is precisely the problem—we have equated “rigor” with pressuring grad students until they are on the verge of emotional collapse. Universities don’t seem to know how to make graduate school difficult in the ways that would actually encourage excellence in research and teaching; they simply know how to make it difficult in ways that destroy their students psychologically.

The job market is even more complicated; in the current funding environment, it would be prohibitively expensive to open up enough faculty positions to actually accept even half of all graduating PhDs to tenure-track jobs. Probably the best answer here is to refocus graduate programs on supporting employment outside academia, recognizing both that PhD-level skills are valuable in many workplaces and that not every grad student really wants to become a professor.

But there are clearly ways that universities could mitigate these effects, and they don’t seem genuinely interested in doing so. They could remove the advancement exam, for example; you could simply advance to candidacy as a formality when your advisor decides you are ready, never needing to actually perform a high-stakes presentation before a committee—because what the hell does that accomplish anyway? Speaking of advisors, they could have a formalized matching process that starts with interviewing several different professors and being matched to the one that best fits your goals and interests, instead of expecting you to reach out on your own and hope for the best. They could have you write a dissertation, but not perform a “dissertation defense”—because, again, what can they possibly learn from forcing you to present in a high-stakes environment that they couldn’t have learned from reading your paper and talking with you about it over several months?

They could adjust or even remove funding deadlines—especially for international students. Here at UCI at least, once you are accepted to the program, you are ostensibly guaranteed funding for as long as you maintain reasonable academic progress—but then they define “reasonable progress” in such a way that you have to form an advancement committee, fill out forms, write a paper, and present before a committee all by a certain date or your funding is in jeopardy. Residents of California (which includes all US students who successfully established residency after a full year) are given more time if we need it—but international students aren’t. How is that fair?

The unwillingness of universities to take such actions clearly shows that their commitment to improving students’ mental health is paper-thin. They are only willing to help their students improve their work-life balance as long as it doesn’t require changing anything about the graduate program. They will provide us with counseling services and free yoga classes, but they won’t seriously reduce the pressure they put on us at every step of the way.
I understand that universities are concerned about protecting their prestige, but I ask them this: Does this really improve the quality of your research or teaching output? Do you actually graduate better students by selecting only the ones who can survive being emotionally crushed? Do all these arbitrary high-stakes performances actually result in greater advancement of human knowledge?

Or is it perhaps that you yourselves were put through such hazing rituals years ago, and now your cognitive dissonance won’t let you admit that it was all for naught? “This must be worth doing, or else they wouldn’t have put me through so much suffering!” Are you trying to transfer your own psychological pain onto your students, lest you be forced to face it yourself?