I would say you have to commit to whatever you do, from mowing to centering clay to swimming to shore or rowing to the end of the lake; people know this. Committing to do your best – not the best, but your present best – is, in my experience, also the most expedient way of doing things since, although it can mean planning ahead to spend a little more time than you’d like, in the end it gets things done the fastest.
But in academia you have to commit and not commit. Commit to teach while knowing you ought not to spend time on it. Commit to a life work while also getting used to the idea of never getting actual work. Commit to writings that may never see the light of day.
One can say this is simply a form of yoga, but I object to the abundance of drill sergeants – do it right! you are shit! who do you think you are? – who are convinced there is one way to do it which will, if the candidate is meritorious, remove the yogic aspect and bestow full meritocratic control. This, incidentally, is an effective way of making people who fail to gain that kind of control feel terrible.
On the dissertation, for example, many are advised that this is their last academic act, since there are no jobs in field or since there is no way of knowing whether they will be competitive for one. So they start to withdraw from the project the way people who are dying start to withdraw from life, which makes it hard to commit strongly enough to actually do it at all. Why do people find this surprising?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 