| I'll give you some advice, but first, a caveat:
PHds are correlated with higher intelligence, and higher self-discipline. This is obviously due to the filtering process involved in achieving such a goal. To succeed in life, you will need self discipline. Intelligence isn't bad either. But most importantly, if it is interesting, gainful employment that you seek, then you must understand that supply and demand drives everything. People often mistake any level of college as some sort of guarantee of a job or money. But it doesn't. Not even close.. It might be a prerequisite for certain positions, but that's all. To get your dream job, you must supply exactly what the employer needs, or at least convince them that you're the best person to provide it. With that in mind, you need to design your life: 1. Begin with the end in mind. If you aren't incredibly precise about what you actually want, you'll just be walking backwards in life, and you might get lucky and end up in a nice place, but probably not. You want a more interesting life. What does that mean? More interesting than your current life? How interesting is that?
Do you want to travel?
Do you want to hunt spies for a living?
What do you actually want to do? Take as much time as you need to precisely answer this question. Seriously. This is critical. 2. Work backwards from this dream life. Let's say you love the ocean, and you have envisioned that your dream job involves sailing on a ship a few months of the year. Well, you've got a few options:
1. Be a nomadic freelancer with a satellite phone.
2. Work for an oceanic survey or marine biology research outfit.
3. Work for the oil industry and help support oil rigs. Whichever sounds great at that point. Dig into whatever is necessary to achive your next step. You might need ta phd if you want to do marine biology research. If you want to be a nomadic freelancer, you should work to establish yourself as an expert in a particular field. You can do so without an employer by creating, or contributing to, open source projects. These are just a few random thoughts, but the point here I want to repeat is: 1. Design your life, don't expect random chance to work out for you.
2. Work towards your design, step-by-step. |