Forms of life, forms of mind

“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.”
― Carl Jung

Let’s get this out of the way first. I do not in any way feel competent to give people advice on how to live a life of science (or anything else for that matter). Especially since much of my advice can be boiled down to “don’t pay too much attention to advice”. But, people often ask me (both my own mentees, to whom I owe some thoughts on this matter, and random people who email me frequently); so here I wrote down and combined the various spiels I’ve given a number of times, in the hopes that it may help someone. I’ve redacted the cursing and the personal examples that are relevant to specific individuals, which often go along with in-person discussions of this topic.

Who is this for?

You may be a high-school student, a college undergrad, a PhD candidate, or a post-doc. If you’re doing fine, are comfortable with your education and environment, and are finding good matches with the people around you, definitely ignore all the below. If you have no lack of mentors with whom you can usefully share all your ideas, if people naturally see how you fit into what they know, you don’t need this. If you have alternate paths planned out in case research doesn’t work out (industry/biotech positions that already exist now, finance, policy jobs, etc.), you also don’t need this.

This is mostly geared to the academic misfits among us. You know who you are; the phenotype is not hard to recognize. You have broad interests and you see commonalities and symmetries in the world that others don’t appreciate, hypothesizing connections across scales and domains that seem outlandish. You ask questions that everyone thinks are “weird”. You have the drive and energy to bring interdisciplinary advances into practice for the good of mankind; you’re not sure yet of the price of this path, but you’re pretty sure you want to pay it. You have unusual ideas, and you have the grit to stand by them even when no one knows what you’re talking about or why.

But it’s not enough to be in conflict with mainstream ideas; being a disagreeable crank is easy. If you like arguing with everyone – you get a charge (be honest!) out of being different and feeling misunderstood and victimized by “the academic establishment” – this is not for you. The people this is targeted to argue and cause frustration not because they like it – they learn to tolerate it because it’s a necessary evil when pushing a novel research agenda or way of thinking.

If you’ve got big ideas and haven’t worked hard to figure out ways to know whether they are correct (not just “how to prove them to everyone”, but “what would I need to see in order to give up this idea?”), also ignore the below – it’s not going to help. If you like to talk more than listen, none of this will help either.

This is for the outliers whose world-view is not calcified. You are able to think of examples in the past where you’ve recognized when your idea was wrong and changed your mind. You like hearing others and learning – you don’t just push your own ideas, you are constantly sifting others’ wisdom to collect the toolkit you need for your life project. You can do well in conventional courses because you have no trouble learning the current paradigm and keeping up with others, but it’s a challenge to stay motivated in those classes because you feel they never quite get to the good (tough) questions. You understand the current rules and tools, and you can’t wait to hack them all. You feel stifled by the mainstream approach and are driven to transcend its limitations. There often is no name for the field you want to work in – when people ask you what you want to be when you mature, you have no simple answer that they will recognize. Perhaps you’ve already decided that you’re going to till a particular corner of thought space, even if it brings no recognition or accolades in your lifetime. Then maybe some of this will be useful. It still won’t be sufficient – it’s just a few notes; you’ll have to do all the hard work.

I’ve been very fortunate to know and to mentor some of these amazing people. Some of them reached out to me as early as junior high school, often having no supportive local environment, academic parents, or anything else that explains why a particular muse visited them. It is a real privilege to watch it operate, and to feel the energy of someone who is connected to their purpose, even though they don’t fully understand any of the details yet. It’s not about raw IQ (although they are typically quite bright), and it’s not about focused achievers building a CV. It’s a completely different thing; I’m not sure we have the vocabulary for it yet, although no doubt it’s an ancient phenomenon. I wonder what it looked like when expressed in early hominids and such. Anyway, here are a few thoughts I’ve tried to distill from the many instructive bumps and bruises I’ve gotten in my own trajectory, and from watching others.

Mentoring

How to choose a mentor? The most important thing to remember here is to set expectations realistically. What would be amazing is a mentor who understands you and your dreams, knows what you need to do, and can guide you on your specific path. This is extremely rare. In most cases, what you can realistically hope for is a series of mentors, each of whom covers some specific area. You have to be very strategic about which areas you need help with, and don’t expect anyone to meet all your needs. No one mentor has to understand all of you, they just need to walk part of the road with you. You have to get used to the idea that there may be no one who goes with you the whole way. That’s part of being a trailblazer…

You might think that a good mentor is someone who has, themselves, been battling to champion some unpopular idea. Surely they will understand your plight and support you, right? Wrong… In my experience, people who fight arduously for a counter-paradigm idea spend all their mental flexibility capital on that fight – they have no energy left for yours. I have found that people who have fought hard for their intellectual baby tend to be the harshest critics for your unconventional idea. They have no attention left, with which to understand your weird ideas; I think, subconsciously they’d like you and others to chill out, and come to a consensus view on everything that they don’t feel passionate about, so that they can focus on grinding their main axe. Your favorite controversy is a distraction to them. If you find a mentor who is already pushing the area you want to commit to, great. Otherwise, don’t bother specifically seeking out people neck-deep in their own battles. Just find the most creative, rigorous, supportive people who can fill gaps in your training.

Getting Advice

The thing with advice overall is this. If someone gives you a specific critique of your experiment, data, or writing – that’s gold. You don’t have to agree with them, and it doesn’t even have to be stated kindly or come from a place of support, for you to profit from it. Even hostile jerks have important things to teach you. Filter the rudeness and sarcasm and see what’s left – what’s the useful core? Squeeze their feedback for every ounce of utility: can something you wrote or said be worded better to be more easily understood by others, or to avoid setting off the wrong fight? Do you need better controls? Better data analysis? Cleaner technique? Did you try to cover too much and distracted them? What led them to say whatever they said – both emotional (social, meta-science issues) and practical facts of your presentation? You can benefit from both. How can it be better next time? Pay close attention to any and all specific critique and sift it for the informational bits of treasure that will allow you to hone your craft over time.

But advice (often un-solicited) on bigger issues – “don’t work on X”, “don’t think of it like Y”, “focus”, etc. – ignore that completely, even if it comes from a Big Name. That’s because smart, successful, inspired people are well-calibrated on their own ideas. They know when to bet on themselves, when to moderate their optimism and creativity, and when to go for it even if the idea doesn’t match current beliefs. In their own chosen area. Not in yours. They’re not calibrated on you, what you can do, your passion, your specific intellectual commitments. There are very few people that are both highly driven and also plastic enough such that their advice will work for you and your unique ideas, goals, and skill set.

The person you want as a mentor is someone who is brilliant, obviously, but most of all, has a very high humility quotient – they need to know the state of the art, but also to understand that we don’t know shit, and be masters of the game of “strong opinions, loosely held”. Then they can have the emotional bandwidth to help you see your path, not just their own path. High-ego “rock stars” are often great for specific details, but terrible for the big picture. But, even a great mentor won’t know the specifics for you, and it’s still on you to make the hard choices. What to devote large chunks of precious time and effort to? When to cut bait and quit on a particular direction? You will have to learn it, by watching others do it in their own domain and then fine-tune your own settings.

Whether or not you find a great mentor, you will have to hone your own intuition. I can’t prove it, or say anything about the neurobehavioral mechanisms of it, but my personal experience is that it’s trainable (over time). You need to practice, with increasingly bigger bets and scale as you progress, listening to your intuition, doing the thing, and seeing how it works out, to get feedback that helps you distinguish noise from deep information and better recognize the actionable intelligence that occasionally makes itself known in your society of mind. Opinions come from many cognitive modules – fear, risk management, social relationships, pure logic, etc. You can learn to distinguish those from that very different source which gives the good (not easy, just good) information. A honed intuition is ultimately your best mentor for addressing the big questions.

The big picture: know what is meaningful to you

Many undergraduate students ask me whether they should go to med school or grad school. Here’s one way to start thinking about it. What do you want to be the time horizon for the rewards of your work? Do you want to see specific people reap life-changing benefits now? Then you should go the clinical route – go to medical school and help people who can benefit from your skill and compassion right now. On the other hand, are you frustrated with the fact that no matter how many people you help now, there will be more, with the same issues? Do you yearn for definitive solutions instead of trying to push back the tide every day? Then your heart is in building civilization – committing to the long-haul and a notion of progress, so that some day the knowledge you generate can solve certain problems definitively. You may never see it, but because you did something, numerous beings could benefit in the future. If you’re comfortable not knowing how (or whether) it works out, but the sense of advance makes it worth it, then go to grad school and do science.

Bigger picture, “what should I do?”. First thing is to realize that you are not the only one who has no idea. Most of us have no idea; having a meaningful life is hard even under the best of circumstances, and being an adult (or a lab head) means continuously making important decisions with very limited information. Everyone is constantly trying to satisfy a myriad incompatible goals and constraints; it’s not just you. You do your best, and then course-correct as needed. It’s ok!

Here’s an exercise to try (I know, it’s hard if you’re very young). Imagine: it’s 20 years from now; you are super happy – fulfilled in every way. What does that look like? What does your day look like? What does your year look like, in terms of which needles you’ve moved? Crucial thing to realize: there are two kinds of happiness which are often conflated. Hedonic happiness is how you’re feeling right now. Eudaimonic happiness is more about long-term meaning and life satisfaction. It’s very hard to have both – you have to be very strategic, lucky, energetic, and self-aware to put yourself in a spot where you can optimize both. The question is, which is more important to you. If you catch me at any given moment, my hedonic happiness is low – I’m often rushed, stressed, chronically under-rested, and ticked off from all the practical stuff that it takes to push research forward. But my eudaimonic happiness is through the roof; when I look back at the end of the year or at a 5-year review and ask what my lab has done, I wouldn’t change all the stress for anything because the results have deep meaning to me. You have to decide; are you the person who values the daily journey, or the specific destinations.

Another career thing for researchers is to think about the following axis. At one end, you’re a PhD student – you’re doing all the work with your own hands. It’s all you, but you can only achieve 1 human’s worth of output. Or, you’re a PI, with some technicians and post-docs – you do less labwork, much of it is done by them, but you’re discovering more stuff than you could do alone. Or maybe you’re the head of a big lab or Center – lots of projects happening, many ideas that come from others, and you barely touch the lab bench. But so much new science is being done by the team, because of your inspiring leadership and interactions with them! Or maybe you’re director of the NIH, or a philanthropist who supports labs doing great research – none of what’s being done is directly coming from you, but you’re enabling a huge amount of new discovery and benefit for mankind. So where is your personal optimum on this continuum – which position on that spectrum makes you most fulfilled? Do you want to optimize total output and impact that you facilitate, or the amount of it you do directly? Ponder it.

Finally. Since you’re likely young, this is probably very difficult, but try this exercise too. You’re on your deathbed. You look back at your life and think, “Wow, yes, that went as well as I could have hoped – all the sweat, blood, and tears – it meant something, totally worth it.” So, what was it that you did? What were the values, accomplishments, positive relationships? What did you change? Whose life did you improve? Write your obituary if it helps – the best case scenario one. What does it say? Then you can rationally work backwards from there, and get it done.

What not do do

It’s natural, after one has been battling upstream with one’s unconventional ideas for long enough, to get bitter about the resistance. You need to internalize the following: no one is out to get you, no one has time to implement a conspiracy to suppress your ideas. There is no one to blame – all you’re battling is the fact that everyone is busy. It’s on you to make your product irresistible, in competing for people’s limited attention. No one is gatekeeping you; they are keeping their own gates (of limited time and attention), and they owe you nothing. There is no one to be angry at. Just do your thing and use that energy to improve your output.

Don’t pick unnecessary fights. Focus your paper or talk on the big thing you want to shift, don’t include other ancillary claims that will irritate readers and open multiple fronts. Pick the hill you’re willing to die on, and focus your story there. You can pick up these other battles next time. People typically, at best, have the plasticity to adapt to 1 new, uncomfortable idea at a time. You probably have many; resist the urge to core-dump all of them in a whirlwind of stream of consciousness. Decide what each public-facing output of yours is designed to nail down.

Let go of the ego – it’s not about you (even when it’s apparently about you). Science is based on criticism, that’s how it goes. Everyone is fighting their own battle, and has their own stressors that affect how they respond to your material. Don’t spend any time trying to figure out who feels what way about you. It doesn’t matter and it’s not personal. Just focus on bringing the community the best product you can bring. Don’t dwell on the negative or keep grudges.

Related to this last point is a visualization I developed to get over my stage-fright. As a scientist, you will have to do a lot of presentations to audiences (and more broadly, your work product is always being critically evaluated). Visualize yourself on that stage as glass – you are completely transparent. No one can see you – all they see is your ideas and results. It’s the science that’s talking, and no one is there to judge you. They don’t have time or inclination to think about you per se. It’s very liberating to realize that no one cares about you (positively or negatively) – only what you’ve got that they can use. If you are happy about what you’re bringing them, that’s all that matters and you can let it shine.

Do not fight your own success. Here is what success looks like: your crazy ideas become obvious to others, and no longer the wild, brave, brilliant insight. Eventually, if you do your job right, everyone will come around to your view, or adopt your new hard-won methods, and the common narrative will neglect all the travails you had along the way. It can be shocking to suddenly not be the trailblazer, once everyone else catches up. It’s a recipe for misery, if that makes you upset or if you see others jumping on the bandwagon as them “stealing it”. You need to come to grips with the fact that the new idea that only you saw, will eventually be “obvious” if you succeed. Adoption by others is what you are going for. But by the time they do, you should be somewhere else (intellectually), pushing some other new thing that is just beginning the journey from “impossible” to “we knew it all along”.

Don’t be unrealistically positive about human nature; scientists are not perfect and generally may not be any better than anyone else at changing their mind or being impartial, open, or flexible. Understand people’s drives and limitations. People have all sorts of incentives, so don’t be shocked when they screw up or do things that are not of the highest character. In terms of practicalities, you can rarely afford to be the disconnected intellectual dwelling in a perfect world of good intentions and interesting ideas. Your ability to make impact will require you to understand how and when others will likely poke a stick into your wheels; learn to anticipate and manage it, without emotional response or anger.

With respect to that last point, here’s a suggestion. I’ll do a separate piece about the science of “free will” soon, but I have found one attitude helpful – both as a mentor and as colleague and mentee. When someone does something nasty, take the Sapolsky approach – just remember that there were factors that caused them to do it, and take practical steps to adapt and make sure you don’t fall for it again. Think of that person, in that circumstance, as a low-agency phenomenon – take the “chemistry and physics” frame; they couldn’t help it, given their biochemistry and past history, so why have any personal animosity toward them? But on the contrary: whenever someone does something good, kind, or brilliant, take the exact opposite approach. Revel in the beauty of their high agency as a real human being, far beyond their physical parts, deserving full credit and admiration for whatever they did. Surround yourself with those kind of people, use them as inspiration to raise your own game. Remember, the bad stuff was determined. The good stuff was a free act of a beautiful spirit. That’s a framing that will enrich your experience.

Impostor syndrome – don’t fight it, it’s normal, but understand it’s not because you don’t compare favorably to others’ social masks; it’s because you’re comparing to your ideal and you can see what it can be. The best people are often the most self-critical because they can see the potential the furthest away from where they are now.

Don’t worry too much about “impact”. It’s a universal acid (in Dennett’s sense), because once you start asking yourself about impact of everything you do, it makes you second-guess every decision about where to publish, whom to talk to, and what to work on. Since it’s really hard to truly know the impact of anything, it undermines every project. If you think too much about how busy people are and how many good papers there are which no one has time to read, you can easily slide into a black hole where it feels like nothing is worth doing. That inhibits creativity. Find a good middle ground between working from the heart, and being intentional about your “theory of change” (how you want the world to be different, due to your efforts).

Don’t say everything you think, everything you’re interested in, or everything you plan to do. This is the most unpleasant advice I’ve had to give, to wide-eyed, optimistic early-career scientists who are yearning to share their ideas with Scientists, these remarkable mythical creatures who are supposed to be open-minded and creative and eager for new ideas that crash the old paradigms. Telling amazing, enthusiastic young people to “tone it down” for the benefit of their career feels awful to me. But the reality is, if you want to maximize your impact, you have to be smart and deal with the practicalities of human nature. When you go on interviews, chances are your wide vision and interest will be interpreted by others as naive, scattered, or misguided. When you meet someone in a gatekeeping position, you need to present a picture they will understand; a linear, simplified, conventional story is the way to go, unless they prove otherwise, by giving you actual evidence that they can support big ideas. You should be focused, have one big idea/interest to talk about, and demonstrate a grasp of the practical difficulties as well as the potential rewards. If you find a sympathetic ear for truly big or unorthodox visions, good for you, but it’s not common. And it doesn’t stop; even when you are experienced and wary, it’s still possible to reduce the impact of your ideas by being too far ahead of the curve and spilling all the beans that aren’t ready to be spilled. The ability to say what you think comes with time and track record, so guard it. Parcel it out carefully, and ask yourself what the payoff will be for every thing you say to others. Just as a datapoint (mine, not necessarily right for you), I currently say about 75% of the things I think. I was at 0%, for years.

Some specific personal techniques

But how then to keep the creativity? Doesn’t this vigilant filtering and consequence-calculating eventually dull the creativity? Yes it does. What about all the self-reflective critiques to limit your tendency to believe your own ideas? Yep, that dulls creativity too. So here’s a strategy. You have to divide your mind, and keep these domains separate. One side (of the mind, not talking about brain hemispheres here) is the logical, critical aspect. It asks about impacts of each action, and poses questions like “what would things look like if I were totally wrong – what would I see?”. This side’s job is to listen to others, see how the work is received (what did they get? what did they reject?), and change your presentation to improve reception. It’s critical, and pays a lot of attention to impact; it is willing to change your writing and your strategy to help your work be accepted in the community. The other side is pristine – no one’s opinions can enter there, and no one’s ability (or not) to understand you matters there. This is where you keep your own ideas, you build your plans, and you write your truth precisely as you see it, regardless of how it would play out currently with others. It’s not that it can’t change, or that every idea is right, but it doesn’t change because of any desire to please anyone else. The point of keeping this little corner walled off is to preserve your intuition and keep it safe from the fads of the field and all the other mundane aspects of the scientific enterprise that trample new, beautiful ideas. It’s not about impact here, or adapting it to anyone else. It’s about connecting with your own best creative process and keeping it distinct from the 3rd-person perspective of “how are others going to see this”. If anyone has a name for this, put it into the Comments. I’m not sure what to call it, but it’s really important to set up and protect.

Read broadly – things that are obvious in one field are considered heresy in another. Learn to think like people in other fields by reading their best works, and you will have new perspectives on yours. Always ask the questions non-experts ask, which often point to deep gaps in your field that students don’t notice because they’ve been inoculated against seeing them. Always ask “how do you know” and “what would it look like, if it wasn’t that way”, about the big fundamental ideas in any field – the ones you’re not allowed to doubt. Take a computer languages class – not one for industry coders, but one taught by a classic computer scientist who wants to show off very different ways to describe computation. Not because you need to code in these languages. The beauty of a class that covers a number of different languages in one semester gets you used to really quickly adopting a completely different world-view and getting things done in a universe where the assumptions and affordances are totally different.

We teach a lot of strong inference (posing crisp experiments to decide between rival explanations), and focus on ruling out hypotheses – the falsification theory of science. It’s an important skill for sure. But where do the imaginative, disruptive hypotheses come from? There is no algorithmic process, like the “scientific method” where you can turn the crank and make progress. The part in that poster of the scientific method we all saw in high-school where it says “formulate a hypothesis” – it might as well be “and then a miracle happens“, because no one teaches how to do it. Some of it comes from experience and from immersing yourself in the subject. But there are books on creativity, and autobiographies of specific scientists which can inspire. Have a cadre of heroes in mind and ask yourself how they got the hypotheses they did – what might have enabled them to do it?

One component to building your own intuition, for having good new ideas, is to show your mind that you’re listening. Again, I have no idea why this works, how generally it works across individuals, or what the mechanism is. All I know is what my experience is and what I’ve suggested to some others for whom it’s worked. The key is that when you get an idea (while jogging, driving, or any other activity), do not let it go and don’t try to just remember it. Write it down somewhere (paper notebook or Evernote software or DevonThink or similar) and go over it later; the key is to get it out of your head, but into a form that preserves it. I’ve noticed that the more you do this, the more the ideas will come. Letting it go and forgetting about it is a signal to your mind that you don’t need ideas; a system that responds to new ideas with a ritual of getting them into a database tends to support their arrival in the future, and frees the creative mind from needing to keep hold of everything in active memory. A close cousin to this is the strategy of offloading all the existing information (ideas, plans, schedules, paper outlines, etc.) into mindmaps, databases, and other tools (see here for more details). I suspect that the more your subconscious believes that the details are safely stored and accessible, the more mind cycles are available for new ideas instead of spending their effort holding on to stuff that’s easily looked up.

I personally visualize discoveries as being like “under positive pressure” – like, they are pushing to come out, if only there was an appropriate portal or conduit. You can be that conduit – study widely (both critically and creatively), listen to your own ideas, and put yourself in a position to work hard to implement them as useful research programs. Over time, this attracts the good ideas to arrive.

And finally: visualize your future lab and the beneficial discoveries you will make – connect to them, as if they already existed and you just hadn’t met them in detail yet. You don’t have to think of it as backwards-time-traveling woo. It’s just a way to raise the cognitive temperature to let the mind do more interesting things.

All of this was just from one guy’s personal experience. If you’ve got strategies that have helped you, or you received good advice from your own mentor, share your tips in the Comments below.

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Featured image by Midjourney.