More like I never had enough willpower to stick to a predetermined life plan and focus on one project at a time, and this turned out to be a blessing in disguise :-)
That seems fair, but given your experience I hopefully don’t need to rely on this form of blessing :)
Imagine a counterfactual version of your past self which did have the willpower to focus on one project at a time (but the willingness not to if required); could you give him advice which could counteract this disadvantage in disguise? Or do you think it is a matter of luck that this turned out to be a good thing?
Well, for one, I’d tell him that his future self that dropped out of the PhD is doing just fine, so there’s no use spending years on it, even if it seems oh so important at the moment :-)
Do you mean: you set out to do one thing but when it failed you fell back on an interesting alternative?
More like I never had enough willpower to stick to a predetermined life plan and focus on one project at a time, and this turned out to be a blessing in disguise :-)
That seems fair, but given your experience I hopefully don’t need to rely on this form of blessing :)
Imagine a counterfactual version of your past self which did have the willpower to focus on one project at a time (but the willingness not to if required); could you give him advice which could counteract this disadvantage in disguise? Or do you think it is a matter of luck that this turned out to be a good thing?
Well, for one, I’d tell him that his future self that dropped out of the PhD is doing just fine, so there’s no use spending years on it, even if it seems oh so important at the moment :-)
No, I just didn’t have enough willpower to pursue a single goal wholeheartedly, so I pursued many goals half-heartedly. It worked out okay for me :-)