What I Learned From Crashing and Burning in Grad School

• Miscellaneous
• Career
• Project Management

In the fall of 2018 I began a graduate program at North Carolina State University that would eventually earn me a Master's degree in Computer Engineering. I was still serving in the US Army at the time, having been selected to go to West Point Military Academy after my graduate program to teach Cadets there in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. I was excited and nervous, to say the least! I had thought that I might enjoy teaching and here was my chance to find out. I had always enjoyed learning and now, finally, I was back in school. It had been over eight years since I had been an undergraduate student, though, so I was a bit nervous that I might need to do a lot of catching up. And although I did really enjoy my time at NC State and I did learn much while I was there, it was this experience that brought me to my knees more than any other to that point in my young adulthood (hence the "crashing and burning" bit from the blog title). This trial, though, became a tremendous catalyst for change in my life and although I'd never quite wish it to happen again, I learned a lot during my experience of crashing, burning, and trying to resurrect myself anew.

Cut to my first year at NC State. I'm taking Mechatronics, Embedded Systems Architecture, and Public Organizational Behavior in my first semester and Advanced Mechatronics, Embedded Systems Design, and Analog Electronics Laboratory in my second. I'm excited and nervous, as I mentioned, and I'm also an overfunctioner: when life gets stressful I try to overcome these stressors by increasing my planning, productivity, and level of action. (Some folks may be underfunctioners: in the face of stressors, they're more apt to relinquish control and "let the chips fall where they may".) So what do I do? I overfunction: I study hard, I work late, I don't stop until I'm confident I have the right answer. I enjoy some early successes; I'm doing well in my classes and, in one, another student actually confuses me with a TA (teacher's assistant). The problem comes when I'm not really able to stop. It turns out that there's always more to learn, that my school projects could always be a little bit better, that there's always someone out there who seems to know more than I know or to be able to do more than I can do. It grates on me. I have to fix it if I want to succeed and so I overfunction to an even greater extent than before. Things get so bad that:

• it's difficult to hold conversations with my wife or friends because my mind is always thinking about my schoolwork,
• I find myself pulling out my phone during even the shortest lull in my social interactions because that's a 30 second window in which I could be doing more research, and
• I lay awake in bed at night because my mind can't stop thinking about whatever academic problem is facing me on that day. On one occasion, I realize near midnight that I've made an error in a PCB design and so, not really wanting to, I get myself out of bed to open up Eagle and to fix my design (again, this is in the middle of the night).

Even more worrisome, my anxiety and stress skyrocket and I'm so distracted and overworked that I'm beginning to neglect my responsibilities as a husband and a father. My marriage starts to fail, as does my health; I'm constantly tired, I'm getting sick more frequently, and I succumb to a mysterious case of Hepatitis A (which magically de-materializes once I'm able to lower my stress levels).

Have you ever been here? Burnt out and overworked. Wanting so badly to achieve something but not seeing the results you expect or desire. Feeling like life just needs more and more from you but you have precious little left to give. Losing joy from the activities that once brought you so much pleasure.

During my second semester I finally realized that something was wrong and needed to change. I started questioning why I felt like I was under so much pressure, why I felt so compelled to work. I was immensely blessed to stumble across a podcast episode in which the guests seemed to be describing something eerily similar to what I was feeling. They described a person who

"is a bottom-line type of person, not one to settle for second best. He or she knows results are what count, and it doesn't matter how you get them, just so you get them fast. In fact, he wants to get the stroke right in the very first lesson. He stays after class talking to the instructor. He asks what books and tapes he can buy to help him make progress faster. [He] starts out by making robust progress. His first spurt is just what he expected. But when he inevitably regresses and finds himself on a plateau, he simply won't take it. He redoubles his effort. He pushes himself unmercifully. He refuses to accept his boss's and colleagues' counsel of moderation. He works all night at the office, he's tempted to take shortcuts for the sake of quick results. [He] lives for the upward surge, the swelling background music, the trip to the stars. When the ardor cools, he doesn't look elsewhere. He tries to keep the starship going by every means at his command."

The guests were authors Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness and they were on the "Art of Manliness" podcast to discuss their latest book (at the time), "The Passion Paradox".

Quoting George Leonard there (from his book "Mastery"), Brad and Steve described someone having what they call obsessive or disharmonious passion (terms originally coined by Robert Vallerand). A person with obsessive passion is driven, not by enjoyment in the activity itself, but by either the external rewards that come from the accomplishment of an activity or by a fear of some kind (fear of losing positive self-image, fear of an uncertain future, etc). This kind of passion can be an intense motivator (and useful, possibly, in the short-term) but it puts a person at risk for burnout, regret, loss of joy, and becoming a slave to external validation and results. In point of fact, the end to George Leonard's quote above is this:

"He doesn't understand the necessity for periods of development on the plateau...Somehow, in whatever he is doing, the Obsessive manages for a while to keep making brief spurts of upward progress, followed by sharp declines--a jagged ride toward a sure fall. When the fall occurs, the Obsessive is likely to get hurt. And so are his friends, colleagues, stockholders, and lovers."

This was me. I had wanted to succeed in school so badly that I become more focused (obsessed, really) with trying to accomplish things than with the learning process. In fact, I discovered (after much soul-searching) that my self-worth had become completely tied up with my accomplishments; I felt that I wasn't worth anything as a person if I didn't have anything to contribute to society. (I even wondered, at one point, why my life would matter if someone wasn't going to write about me in a history book someday. It hurts to write that now because of how misguided and toxic a thought that is, but it was true at one point.) Had I been more focused on learning instead of accomplishing, it might have been easier for me to break away to sleep or to spend time with my family, knowing that I'm a better learner when I do those things.

In "The Passion Paradox", Brad and Steve describe a different kind of passion, though. One in which

"you become wrapped up in an activity primarily for the joy of doing the activity itself. When you experience success with humility and failure with temperate resolve. When you goal becomes your path and your path becomes your goal. When your passion is fueled by deep purpose and is in harmony with the rest of your life. When you practice mindful self-awareness to pierce through the tidal inertia that passion can create, giving you control over your passion so your passion doesn't control you. When you feel alive not just for a few months or a few years but for an entire career or lifetime. This is the passion we all crave. This is the best kind of passion."

Brad and Steve call this (again using Vallerand's terms) harmonious passion and they say that it arises when a person is able to develop six qualities (what they call the "Mastery Mindset"):

1. Being driven from within
2. Focusing on the process (not the outcomes)
3. Worrying not about being the best, but about being the best at getting better
4. Embracing acute failure for chronic gains
5. Being patient
6. Being present

"Being driven from within" means nurturing the part of yourself that intrinsically enjoys the thing about which you're passionate and down-playing the part of you that enjoys the attention and accomplishment that sometimes comes from it. Everybody likes winning and accolades, the authors state, but this is the heart of disharmonious passion so we can at least work to minimize it. The authors give their clients a "24-hour" rule to try and develop this practice: for only twenty-four hours after a big win or loss are their clients allowed to either celebrate or mope, as the case may be. After that, they have to simple get back to the work at hand.

"Focusing on the process" means replacing your outcome goals with process goals. An outcome goal makes the outcome of your effort the main target: "Win this race", "Finish this project", etc. The problem is that, if we're being truly honest with ourselves, they represent things that we have no control over. We can't control the weather or our competitor's own preparation come race day. We can't control delays or setbacks in the project's timeline. So we're sort of setting ourselves up for failure by making those our ultimate goal. Furthermore, an outcome goal doesn't often give you useful feedback if you aren't able to achieve it. If you didn't finish the project, why? What should you do better next time? It's hard to tell. A process goal, on the other hand:

1. identifies the desired endstate (i.e. the outcome goal),
2. determines what actions I need to do to best help that outcome goal come about, and then
3. makes those actions the goal.

Instead of the goal being to "Win this race" my goal becomes to "Train hard for 60 min, 3 times a week, in preparation for the race". Instead of "Finish the project" its "Start each work session with 10 min of creating/reviewing my project management documents to ensure that I'm working on the right thing". Not only are these things much more under my own control, but they also give me useful information if I don't achieve my outcome goal. Did I not finish the project on time? Was it because I didn't start my work sessions by checking my project management documents? If I did, then what's something I can do in addition to that to help my next project finish on time?

"Worrying not about being the best, but about being the best at getting better" represents a paradigm shift in your values. Being the best at something is nice, but it's "other-focused" whereas focusing on simply being better than we were before is "self-focused"; it often causes people to resort to "playing not to lose" (being fearful of losing, not wanting to take risks) instead of "playing to win" (having fun, experimenting and trying new things)."When your utmost goal is simply to get better," say Brad and Steve, "all failures and successes are temporary because you will forever improve, given more time and more practice."

"Embracing acute failure for chronic gains" means to appreciate and welcome failure as a valuable teaching tool, not to avoid it for fear of the damage it might do to one's ego. One of my favorite quotes is from Winston Churchill, who said, "Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm." There are plenty of stories of famous individuals who've experienced horrible failure in their lives and I'm more and more convinced there is no path to success that doesn't go through innumerable failures; the "successful" individuals are simply those who learned from those failures and never gave up. The great basketball player Michael Jordan once said, "I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed."

"Being patient" is critical to harmonious passion because, as George Leonard says, "To learn anything significant, to make any lasting change in yourself, you must be willing to spend most of your time on the plateau." Indeed, I have a belief that life is designed so that tremendous gains only come to someone when they doggedly pursue their passion, long after their compatriots, motivated not by the activity itself but by the accolades and results, have lost motivation and drifted away. Brad and Steve recommend focusing on your purpose, the meaning that you derive from your passion, when your patience wanes.

"Being present" is about more than just focusing your attention on the task at hand (which is, itself, important for success in anything that is cognitively demanding). It's also about bringing novelty and fascination to tasks that can easily feel mundane, with the result being that you become aware of tiny subtleties in the process of your task, subtleties that only masters are able to identify.

Brad and Steve describe the people on the path of mastery as those who

"not only accomplish great things, but do so in a healthy and sustainable manner. They exude a Zen-like aura, are resistant to burnout, and produce work that is of a special kind of quality--a quality that is born out of love. And yet perhaps their greatest accomplishment is an even more cherished one: continual growth and development, a fulfilling life."

It's taken me several years to even start to develop this kind of passion (to this day I struggle with becoming too obsessed with accomplishing things), but their book is what started my journey. I'm happy to report that, after about a year of marital and individual counseling and several years of quiet introspection, not only is my marriage stronger than ever but I've begun the process of living more fully and more joyfully. This can be you and harmonious passion can be yours. The key is exactly as simple, and as difficult, as developing the "Mastery Mindset". As Brad and Steve like to say, "The process is simple. It's not easy, but it is simple."

This was not a paid review of "The Passion Paradox" and I don't know the authors personally. I merely learned a lot from this book and wanted to help others who may be on the same journey that I was on several years ago! I hope you've found some value in it if you've made it this far.

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