I kinda feel the tradeoffs given miss an opportunity. It's probably not a great idea for most people to expend any time going after careers that are essentially lottery-win levels of rarity to truly succeed. i.e. Professional sports players like baseball or golf, as listed here. I would also suggest that being a tenure-track and especially tenured professor qualifies in this list, despite the pay discrepancies.
Quote
"The more time you sink into the wrong idea, the more you are misspending life’s most precious resource. But if you quit at the right time (and ignore that sunk cost), then you can move on to scale something else—something with a better shot at success."
This definitely applies across things more than just peoples careers and business ideas. I would say this applies broadly. Emotions steer people around and they have a root - a main source of their existence within that person. But further, emotions can lead a person astray. Relationships, too, can lead a person astray if the relationship is with a toxic person. All these things (all things) are best moderated.
Depends on your decision criteria and metric of “success”.
If someone truly loves doing something, and enjoys the process, then why not? If you like being on teams, get a college scholarship and education, and don’t quite make it to the NFL, then quitting early isn’t a great idea.
If someone loves getting a PhD, get’s the stipend, enjoys the process, and then doesn’t get tenure… then they’ve at least spent 7-8 years of their life doing something they enjoy. Optimizing for some end goal or binary idea of success isn’t a good move in my view. Enjoying the process is as important as the outcome.
Being a pro athlete takes brains, natural athletic ability, dedication to training, and injury avoidance. Only one of those things is in the person’s control.
I think you're talking about two different things. In ianai's example, the goal is a tenure-track professorship. In yours, it's essentially "get a PhD and see what happens." Both are perfectly fine goals, but they are different.
Makes sense - I’d just not encourage someone to quit or not get a PhD because the odds are against them for a tenured position. At this point a tenured position is something you luck into (after a hell of a lot of work and politics), but way too much is out of one’s control at the start of a PhD to make that a goal and reason for getting the degree. It’s like letting your probability of being an F1 driver determine whether you take an advanced driving course. Maybe that makes sense, but I’d more heavily weight how much I like driving in the decision rather than the potential for being an F1 driver.
The numbers don’t work at all - one tenured professor might produce 30-50 PhDs in her career. Only one will replace the professor’s tenured position. If just 5 actually go on to run labs somewhere else, they may produce another 50 each, leading to ~250 qualified people aiming for one of six positions, which are filled until the 6 retire.
There's definitely a range between tenure-track professorship and professional sports as careers. Plus I think there may be some wider lack of knowledge about just how more competitive professorships at colleges have become recently. I seem to recall it's in the 10s to 100s of thousands. Professional sports is much more scarce. Probably those two help flush out what a range of acceptable odds to aim to overcome and maybe not looks like.
Most PhDs (all?), though, are beyond the diminishing returns to additional outlays of effort. Diminishing returns are probably a good metric to inform people about, too.
I wonder what the ratios look like, if you looked at competitive D1 athletes <> professional sports openings compared to PhD-bound grad students <> tenure track position openings.
I think you got really hung up on my examples and missed my larger point. The point I think OP makes applies way beyond just career/major life choices. It also applies to emotions, impulses, habits, etc.
I went back and re-read your comment. I agree with your point, and think failing fast and cutting losses makes sense.
This isn’t what I think you were saying, but I read it this way the first time - I wouldn’t let the fear of failure or achieving some end state stop one from trying to do something. I think instead it would make sense to build in exit points going into an experience, where you can check how things are going and exit gracefully rather than “quitting”. Recognizing when you go into a PhD program that one of the outcomes may be exiting after two years with a Master’s degree and being ok with that takes a lot of pressure off.
> ... and don’t quite make it to the NFL, then quitting early isn’t a great idea.
aren't we cursed by our power of hindsight in which we play both judge and jury with how we define success. Making poor/bad/terrible choices and then go on living without obsessing about them seems simply a way of coping.
We're cursed because it matters how we see ourselves but also how others view us affects our perception. And we constantly have to reintegrate societies view with our own. Adding insult to injury: the yardstick used by society is also shifting over time so actions are not future proof. (think about reality vs. myth in characters like Nero or Machiavelli and how long it takes to correct some of the believes previously held by society against new evidence)
Problem with judging ourselves is our vantage point to do so correctly is even worse than society. Because a) we're still alive, b) we're biased, c) we don't have the distance of time d) observers-effect.
If we're unhappy but alive we are able to try harder and hope for a better future, or even doing nothing and sitting it out. We can defer our judgement until our position has improved enough to yield a better outcome.
Then time itself is a problem when applying the yardstick to ourselves because we're unable to make a final and ultimate statement until we have no more capacity to improve our odds (are dead, but even after our death our choices might have affected the lives of our offsprings so they became an ultimate hero or a villain).
> If someone loves getting a PhD, get’s the stipend, enjoys the process
It's actually survivorship bias because the person we could've been if had gotten our shot never existed. The mediocre risk-averse choice has killed that possible universe in which this person could have thrived. They became a casualty of the mediocre.
If that person instead of taking the mediocre, and least risky path dropped out, and as a result struggled with their environment, formed toxic habits, then recovered, reformed, bettered themselves, wrote an influential book to puzzle and better humanity for the next 500 years ... How would that (successful) person judge how mediocre they could have turned out instead? And would they still say it would have been better not to suffer?
Personally I think none of this matters. If a tree falls in a forest ...
Quote "The more time you sink into the wrong idea, the more you are misspending life’s most precious resource. But if you quit at the right time (and ignore that sunk cost), then you can move on to scale something else—something with a better shot at success."
This definitely applies across things more than just peoples careers and business ideas. I would say this applies broadly. Emotions steer people around and they have a root - a main source of their existence within that person. But further, emotions can lead a person astray. Relationships, too, can lead a person astray if the relationship is with a toxic person. All these things (all things) are best moderated.