Finishing a PhD in Finance While Competing

A doctorate is mostly endurance. There is no dramatic breakthrough scene, only several years of returning to the same difficult document and making it slightly less wrong.

The long middle is the hard part

The first year has novelty and the last has adrenaline. Between them sits a long middle where nothing feels like progress. What carried me through was lowering the bar for a good day: not a finished chapter, but two hundred honest words.

Attention is the scarce resource, not time

I had time. What I did not have was uninterrupted attention. Teaching, rehearsals, appearances and a thesis all draw from the same account. I began protecting two mornings a week completely, and those two mornings produced more than the other five combined.

• No email before the writing block.
• The same desk, the same hours, so I stop negotiating with myself.
• One question per session, written at the top of the page.

A thesis is finished by the person who kept turning up, not the person who felt inspired.

Write badly and early

My supervisor's most useful instruction was to send unfinished work. Waiting until something is good enough to show is how people lose a year. Bad drafts are editable. Blank pages are not.

The two lives helped each other

Standing on a stage taught me to speak about my research without hedging. The research taught me to answer a question on stage with structure. I expected the two worlds to compete, and mostly they lent each other something.

What I would tell a first year student

Keep a record of small progress, because you will not feel it while it happens. And find one person who will read your worst draft without flinching.