Hi friends,
I find it ironic that I am writing about the work we do in a time when work as we know it has been completely upended. But even more so, it forces us to ask the questions of what we deem as success, or as meaningful, in our work, which would make this post (which is about 4 months in the birthing) quite timely indeed.
So, after soliciting answers from friends in careers ranging from song-writer to consultant to med resident to counsellor, here are some of my thoughts on the work we do.
(If you want to read the rest of the Micah6.8 series, start here: Part 1: never productive enough, Part 2: the food we eat, Part 3: the beauty we create)
“Hey, sorry I’m late!” I squeeze my heavy winter coat into the space between two tiny wooden chairs, and give Nicole a quick hug.
It has been a day of working in my dank office with one square of glass half obstructed by a snowbank as my only source of sunlight.
I’m just grateful to be outside, but especially now in the warmth of this cafe, verdant with hanging vines. (All you Montrealers, yes it is Cafe Parvis I’m talking about)
“Not at all, how’s it going?” She asks, after I situate myself and order a cheese and chive scone. It normally takes me a few seconds to answer that question as I sieve through the mundane moments of my day and cherry-pick a few I think would be of interest to my listener.
But Nicole is a PhD student too, so I tell it as it is, “Oh you know how it is. Spent the morning analyzing data, only to realize that all my drug release experiments haven’t been working.”
I take a buttery bite of my cheese and chive scone.
I take it as a sign of being in the latter-half of my PhD that I really can’t afford the emotional energy to worry about failed experiments. My younger self would have taken it more personally.
“You?” I ask between bites.
Nicole’s in her first year, so her problems are more dealing with a wealth of information and a million possible directions her project could take. It’s swimming in an ocean without an anchor.
I laugh and tell her that yes, you go through many of these mini existential crises – not knowing where to take your project, if someone else has already done this sort of research and/or is probably more qualified at you at it, then questioning if what you’re doing even matters at all.
I tell her that one of my coping mechanisms is to escape – literally.
I bake orange almond cake, knit the myrtle green cardigan that’s taking me forever to finish or wander the aisles of my local supermarket.
And so we sit, with our steaming mugs of coffee and cheese-chive scones, and talk candidly about what our work life is. The things we fear, but also the things we hope and dream for.
I’ve been thinking more about work lately.
There are certainly days when I go through the motions without putting too much thought into it: pack my lunch, board the metro, draft up my experiments, go to my scheduled meetings.
Or at least my thoughts more revolve around whether or not I’ll be late to the next meeting, or whether I should pack a brownie in my lunchbox (Health vs. Happiness?)
But then there are other days when I wonder what the end goal is.
To publish enough papers to secure a professorship?
To stumble across a groundbreaking discovery that will win me a Nobel Prize?
To earn lots of money and retire early?
This line of thinking usually emerges from a bout of low-grade anxiety – stressed that I’m not moving fast enough towards some vague perception of where I think I should be.
I turn these ambitions over in my head.
I try to picture to the tenured professors I know, or the Nobel Prize winners I have met in the past.
The retirees with huge 401ks who play golf and stay at weekend cottages with sailboats.
Is that the life I am aiming towards, and if not, what is?
A while ago, I came across a paper in Nature written by scientists as they reflected on their recent publications in the world renown journal.
You would think that the publication would have marked the epitome of their career, something we should all aspire to.
And yet, their biggest lessons?
“My biggest realization is that you don’t need to move up the academic career ladder to have a satisfying career in science. The moment I stopped worrying about advancing in academia marked a change for me.”
– Johan Van Der Hoogen
It does make you pause and think.
The fact that it would take actually publishing a paper in Nature for you to realize that that’s not what it was about anyways.
From a young age, I have been fed the message of “the more, the better”.
If you can bargain with the teacher for more marks, you should.
If you can apply to be in 9 Advanced Placement (AP) classes instead of 8, you should.
It was better to skip ahead to Grade 11 Biology than stay in Grade 10 Science.
It is the message that we should be ambitious and fight for those recognition we deserve.
We should make it into the high ranks of society and occupy positions like CEO or Dean.
We should be able to do anything we dream of doing so we should have as many options as possible to choose from.
To be honest, I think that’s why many Ivy League graduates go into consulting jobs: we don’t know what that dream is but we know we should be able to do anything we dream of doing, so we go into consulting to keep as many doors open as possible. (of course, there are those for whom consulting is their end goal – trying not to speak for all consultants here…)
Having the most options is our definition of success.
And even if it’s not about having the most options, it’s about having the most impact.
We tell ourselves that this is the nobler dream after all.
We want to help the most people. That’s why we want to earn more money, climb up the ladder and publish in those high-impact journals.
Or if you’re an entrepreneur, it’s why you want to be the next Apple and revolutionize the way the world does things.
If you’re a teacher, it’s why you want to mould the next generation.
We have these grand ambitions of leaving our impact on the world because deep down inside, we are deeply fearful of being forgotten, our short-lived existence on this earth snuffed out without a trace.
We want to matter.
I get that.
It’s why I sometimes struggle in the PhD. Precisely because it feels like my day to day is so far away from these lofty ideals of impact and changing the world.
It sure doesn’t feel like I’m changing the world pipetting and plotting Excel graphs that will one day potentially make it into a paper that joins the stack of thousands of hardly-cited papers.
Or worse still, at home and NOT in lab, puttering about with my knitting and striped fuzzy socks, answering emails or joining Zoom calls.
I’d even venture to say that the sentiment is not just shared by graduate students.
In perusing through the answers from friends who now occupy various realms of the working sector, I most enjoyed reading the section that asked them to describe a mundane but common part of their work.
Reading instructions about how to obtain a tax ID number from the IRS, said the entrepreneur.
There was a lot of checking emails and writing clinical notes from both the medical student and counsellor.
It’s a grind for sure, said my teacher-friend.
Tracking milestones, telling junior personnel what to do and making Powerpoint slides, was the consultant’s answer.
And our hope in all this grind is that we are working our way to something that will make its mark.
This WILL matter; WE will matter, we tell ourselves.
This is why the first time I read Ecclesiastes I didn’t get it.
My bright-eyed, hopeful self couldn’t understand Solomon’s somber pessimism.
Therefore I completely despaired of all the fruit of my labor for which I had laboured under the sun…for what does a man get in all his labor and in his striving with which he labor under the sun? Because all his days his task is painful and grievous; even at night his mind does not rest. This too is vanity.
Ecclesiastes 2:20, 22-23
His message? You don’t matter.
Soon, you will vanish into dust, and maybe the work you have toiled for will be continued on by someone else, but maybe not.
So why are you trying so hard?
Doesn’t that just grate against every millennial fiber in your body?
Here’s a counter-intuitive thought: what if success isn’t about impact?
Because I think this is where I’m landing, after sitting on the question of work and success for five months now and reading through the responses my friends sent in.
Even while every fiber of my Asian, Princeton, good-Christian-girl being does not agree.
Because when I thought about impact, I thought about all the unknown factors outside of my control that decide my “impact” –
– the reviewers who will read the paper I write, what opportunities my network will bring, heck even whether I manage to make my brain think about my experiments in the right way.
If high impact is the goal, I don’t know how to get there.
There was even a Medium article titled “On luck, success and becoming a professor.” You can imagine what the conclusion was.
Then past actually getting to the place of much impact (but who measures “impact” anyways? And how much impact is enough?), if COVID has taught me anything, it’s that life is fragile.
The stock market, our health, our communities, our world – we’re all so, so fragile.
And that place of high impact we had worked so hard to achieve is as fragile as the rest of it.
I think that realization (because it never wasn’t NOT fragile; we just didn’t realize it) is what is causing all the latent anxiety during this crisis.
So, then to what end should we be aiming towards in our work, if not for impact?
It is an individual journey for each one, so this is where I eventually landed:
success to me is when I am faithful, kind, humble.
Faithful
This is what I always come back to when I’m discouraged by my work. I can’t control much, but the one thing I can control is to keep showing up.
Our transactional culture likes to move on from things when it no longer delivers:
marriages when they lose their fire, churches when they don’t make us feel warm and fuzzy, jobs that are no longer fun and exciting.
So, success is when I persevere when it’s not as fun.
It also means being diligent and excellent at the tasks in front of me, without obsessing over them, which can sometimes be a fine line.
There was a moment two months ago when I felt myself getting too attached to my project, where my desire for excellence was turning into low-grade anxiety.
That morning, I received a voice message from Victor, a friend from Princeton who’s currently a medical resident, as he responded to my prompt.
Med students are expected to do everything – do well academically, have passion, be involved with numerous projects, take care of themselves, he said, but it’s impossible to actually do it all.
I know I will inevitably fail, even when I try my best.
But, because of my relationship with Christ, I can live freely and without guilt or shame because in my brokenness, He completes us –
Remembering and living in light of that that is success for me.
So, that morning, as I listened to Victor, remembering this was my success:
I can live freely, independent of a successful or failed outcome, because my identity is not tied to that success.
All I have to be is faithful.
Kind
I still continue to be taken aback by the response my piece on coffee breaks received from the global research community. More than we would dare to admit, we are craving kindness. People who will reach out and remind us that we are not alone.
Even Nature says, people will not trust unkind science.
“If we want to build trust in science and scientists, it is not enough to think about ‘what’ we achieve; we must think about ‘how’ we influence those around us.”
One of the hardest parts about doing the PhD has been the feeling of isolation, or the feeling of needing to compare and compete with people around me.
So, being kind means saying hi to my colleagues in the lab and asking how they’re doing.
It’s taking off my headphones and chatting with my office mate even though I’d rather be powering through the work I have in front of me.
It’s also being more open with my failures when I’d rather pretend everything is okay. It’s having more conversations like the one I had with Nicole at Cafe Parvis.
Because for all the hashtags and workshops on mental health and wellbeing, I think a lot could be solved if we were just more kind.
Being kind also means being detailed with my materials and methods because I’m thinking about the people who will come after me and try to reproduce my experiment.
What kind of materials and methods would I want to be reading? That’s the attitude I want to have when I write my own.
For my entrepreneur friend, Nahrie, kindness is deciding not to sell a product because you know it does not meet quality control even though you could be making easy money off of it.
Kindness isn’t easy when we’re constantly told to put growth, numbers, productivity above people, so if I continue to choose that whether I’m in a place of low or high impact, I would count that successful.
Humble
Then, there’s humility – and I think this is really what Ecclesaistes is all about.
Remembering our place as creation and not Creator.
Accepting our limitations and exchanging our striving for the grace of rest.
Becoming more fully human.
For me, that means coming to terms with the smallness of my PhD.
Most likely, I will not make a groundbreaking discovery that changes the face of cancer research.
The technology I am working on will probably never make it out of the lab.
The papers I write will be read by a handful of people.
And I need to be okay with that.
Don’t think like that, people tell me, you need to dream big!
You need to believe that the knowledge you produce in the PhD will one day be useful. That generations of scientists after you will iterate on your PhD and discover something wonderful.
Maybe, or maybe not. I’m not opposed to the possibility.
But even then, I am dependent on others – the present scientific community as well as the generations of those to come.
And I am humbled by that fact.
On a day to day level, humility is setting aside my work for the day and going to bed, because even though I have not done everything on my list, I am tired and it is good to rest.
It means being honest with my supervisor when my experiments are not working and presenting the bad results. Then, when she asks me what caused it, to say, “I’m not really sure,” instead of pretending that I have everything figured out.
And then it’s also just enjoying the small, mundane parts of my job –
when I figure out how to change my bar graph color on PRISM,
when I’m measuring out a powder and it comes out to the exact amount up to 2 decimal points (just thinking about it makes me smile),
when I discover that Shift-Command-Down allows me to select a whole column in Excel for all the copying and pasting I do.
So this is where I am right now – wanting to be faithful, kind and humble in my work – because while I am not opposed to my work having a great impact, it is an elusive goal that makes me more anxious the more I try to pursue it.
I want to end with what the great theologian and writer C.S. Lewis preached in 1939 in his sermon titled “Learning in wartime”:
A more Christian attitude…is that of leaving futurity in God’s hands. We may as well, for God will certainly retain it whether we leave it to Him or not…
Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future.
Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment ‘as to the Lord’.
It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for.
The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.
To receive the grace to do the duty in this present moment and leaving futurity in God’s hands:
this is the work we are to do.
I hope you enjoyed that reflection on work. My next installation on the micah6.8 series will be on…..DATING (entitled “the people we date”).
That’s right. You will hear me expound on my theology of dating, but in particular, how it pertains to dating apps.
If you would like to participate in this one (don’t worry, for this one, all opinions/stories will be anonymous because I know it’s personal), please fill out this survey!
If you fill it out, you’ll stand a chance to win either a free customized calligraphy card sent to your address OR a free ticket to one of the cooking webinars I will be hosting. Click here for more details. Offer ends May 11 so do it soon!!
