PhD Lesson #3: Invest in your long-term growth

A PhD is full of urgent tasks. There is always another analysis to run, another experiment to plan, another paper to read, another figure to improve, or another deadline approaching.

It is easy to spend every day only doing what is immediately necessary.

During my PhD, I tried to reserve a small part of each day for the opposite: learning something that was not necessarily useful that week, but might become valuable in the future.

For me, this was 30 minutes every morning. I made a daily habit out of it by always choosing the same time so it happened automatically. I plan to keep this habit for the rest of my life because I believe it is so crucial.

Sometimes I used this time to improve skills directly related to my PhD. Sometimes I used it for skills that felt almost unrelated. In my first PhD year, I completed two consecutive Master’s-level machine learning courses in computer science by working through the assignments every morning before starting my research.

At the time, this had little to do with my neuroscience project. Years later, it became one of the reasons I was able to transition into AI engineering.

Some of the most valuable things we learn are not immediately useful.

Long-term growth requires making space for skills before we urgently need them.

It could be programming, statistics, writing, public speaking, a foreign language, or something completely different. What matters is choosing one skill and practicing it systematically for long enough that it becomes part of who you are.

We live in a time where learning has never been easier. We have YouTube, online courses, ChatGPT, and access to experts all over the world. Many skills can be learned for free. At the same time, I often paid for structured online courses. A good teacher can save enormous amounts of time, and we should never shy away from investing in ourselves.

Don’t overestimate what you can learn in a week. But don’t underestimate what you can learn in a year.