you gave yourself much more career capital than if you’d worked on one alone
I don’t think this is true, and that’s my main takeaway. It’s true I gave myself two opportunities to acquire career capital—the PhD and the startup—but the latter never turned into actual career capital. In expectation, the start up looked promising (to my, possibly deluded eyes) but it turned out, in fact, to be much use to me. When i started it I thought “if Hippo works I’ll be a tech billionaire. If it doesn’t work, at least I’ll have learnt loads” but in reality Hippo didn’t work and I didn’t learn much. That’s the, somewhat subtle, cautionary tale.
The incremental amount of improvements each individual project would see if you went at it full time (i.e. one more published research paper, a fully functioning machine learning feature) likely do not matter in the long term.
I want to push back on this too. I can see how much more progress I’m making on philosophy now I’m just focused on that. I basically scraped through my first year review. One important thought is that you only get really good at X by focusing on X (e.g. see Cal Newport’s Deep Work) and that most work is done by the top performers, e.g. 20% of academics get 80% of the citations, etc. Hence if you’re not laser focused you’re ruling yourself out of the top category where the real change happens. Again, I’m making a nuanced point: I’m not saying there is no value to exploration, but I am saying there is value to focus. I don’t think I’d adequately recognised the trade-off. Would I have changed my choices? Not obviously, but this might be a useful lesson which could change what someone in a different position would do. Hence I’m sharing and hoping this is useful for someone else!
I don’t think this is true, and that’s my main takeaway. It’s true I gave myself two opportunities to acquire career capital—the PhD and the startup—but the latter never turned into actual career capital. In expectation, the start up looked promising (to my, possibly deluded eyes) but it turned out, in fact, to be much use to me. When i started it I thought “if Hippo works I’ll be a tech billionaire. If it doesn’t work, at least I’ll have learnt loads” but in reality Hippo didn’t work and I didn’t learn much. That’s the, somewhat subtle, cautionary tale.
I want to push back on this too. I can see how much more progress I’m making on philosophy now I’m just focused on that. I basically scraped through my first year review. One important thought is that you only get really good at X by focusing on X (e.g. see Cal Newport’s Deep Work) and that most work is done by the top performers, e.g. 20% of academics get 80% of the citations, etc. Hence if you’re not laser focused you’re ruling yourself out of the top category where the real change happens. Again, I’m making a nuanced point: I’m not saying there is no value to exploration, but I am saying there is value to focus. I don’t think I’d adequately recognised the trade-off. Would I have changed my choices? Not obviously, but this might be a useful lesson which could change what someone in a different position would do. Hence I’m sharing and hoping this is useful for someone else!