Just had a conversation with an early PhD student thinking about whether they should leave grad school. It made me think about how it must be hard for junior people in general (in academia + industry) to find comfort in work right now.

Here's a thread of what I told this person.

If you're ambitious and young, work is probably not always fun. Where you're trying to go is beyond what you're currently capable of and growth can be painful.

What kept me going is having a community going through the same thing. Find or build that community at all costs.

People often ask you, "But how do you FEEL about your work?"

I don't like this question because 1) work is not always fun when it's hard and 2) how you feel about work is often a projection of how you feel about life and few people few great about life during the pandemic.

Then there's the question of how to motivate yourself if you don't feel good about what you're doing.

It's a skill to be able to get yourself from point A to point B even if you're not feeling great about point B. That's the #1 skill I look for when interviewing. Work on this.

It can feel disorienting to push forward in a career path if you don't know what you want or where you're going.

But the more you make forward progress on anything, the easier time you'll have doing anything else. Think of ability to make progress as another skill to work on.

I know these are stressful times, but I'll end with advice I wish I had been given more often: you don't get credit for angsting.

You're doing the thing you're doing no matter what. If you time-box and emotion-box your angsting, you'll have a better time and more to show for it.