A doctorate is typically the first step in a longer (academic or otherwise) research career. Many think of it as a grueling rite of passage one must endure to get the job they want later on. But are there ways we can do the PhD to set us up for a remarkable and satisfying career? Are there ways we can make the PhD journey itself feel like a “good job”? In the first part of this book extract, we draw lessons from Cal Newport’s book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, about “passion traps”, we look at properties of a good PhD job, focusing on mastery, control, and how to develop them for a more satisfying PhD (and beyond).

Lately I have been pondering where to take my career next. Similar to PhD students (and unlike many of my fellow supervisors, who are tenured), my current position as researcher is temporary. Should I stay in the classic academic path and strive for a stable professor position at my university? Strike it on my own, focusing more on efforts like this blog and the related doctoral workshops? Do something entirely different? The recent comeback of a mild undercurrent of burnout makes these decisions muddier. To help me navigate these questions, I recently turned to Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You. While reading, I found quite a few pieces of advice that would be helpful for the doctoral students that read this blog.

First, a note on timescales. Newport’s book is about reflecting, planning and executing your whole professional career, not just a few-years slice like the PhD. Hence, it often tackles wider career questions that aren’t necessarily doctorate-specific (e.g., whether we should do a PhD at all, and what role the PhD has in our overall career, rather than how to do the PhD itself). That said, the mindsets and ideas the book promotes can be very useful for doctoral students to set them up for a satisfying (and successful) research career.

“Follow your passion” is bad advice

The opening premise of the book is that the often-heard career advice to work on something you are passionate about (what he calls the “passion hypothesis") is bad career advice. He argues that a) not everyone has a clear pre-existing passion that one can transform into a job; and b) we don’t really understand what that one passion-aligned job will really entail, day-to-day – and thus, by pursuing that one job single-mindedly, we can damage other areas of our lives, like family, social connections, contribution to society… in short, other important values we hold.

The main lesson for PhD students I draw from this part: do not assume you know at the beginning exactly what your PhD topic should be (this is something I see in quite some of the students I meet, especially part-time students for whom “the PhD is their hobby”). It’s good to have preferences and tastes, but be flexible in the face of feedback from knowledgeable people (and research literature!) that tell you some other topic is more relevant and feasible for you to investigate. You can still have autonomy about what and how to research within this other topic!

Traits of a good (PhD) job

The initial chapters also discuss what are the traits of a “good job/career”. Drawing heavily from our old friend self-determination theory (SDT), he suggests traits like autonomy about what we do or how to do it; space to develop mastery (i.e., specific skills that make you good at the job); liking (or at least, not actively disliking) the people with whom you interact regularly (relatedness, in SDT speech); or having a cool mission for your job/career (related to what we called purpose in a prior post on happiness in the lab).

In this regard, a PhD is often a good choice for some years in your career, as it has the potential to check many of these boxes (albeit Newport is critical of doing a PhD without a clear idea of why your career needs it): many PhD students enjoy high levels of autonomy, develop mastery over interesting research, technical and transversal skills, and have the opportunity to interact frequently with interesting, smart people. However, this depends a lot on where (e.g., the lab or research group) you do your doctorate. Your mileage may indeed vary!

Also, a note on finding or developing a mission during the PhD: don’t have high expectations of finding a great mission during the PhD years. As Newport notes, cool missions often require many years of trial and error to be found. As a colleague once put it, the PhD is more about “getting the driver’s license” than making the “best lap of your life” (to follow the driving metaphor). In this sense, the PhD is normally more about mastery and autonomy than mission. Still, consider these factors when choosing where to do a PhD, and what to do afterwards (be it a postdoc, professorship, industry position, or whatever else).

There’s an important corollary to this reflection on traits of a good job: these job traits are actually rare and valuable. Which means they are not easy to find, and people don’t give out these jobs to just anyone. You need to develop rare and valuable skills in order to get any of these jobs. And not just any skill, rare and valuable skills that are relevant to the job you aspire to. Thus, for a (prospective) PhD student, developing some sort of research-useful skill during the masters can help you find a good PhD position in a place where these traits are present; and developing good research, technical and transversal skills during the PhD (e.g., the ability to publish good papers in good venues in your field) can help you land a postdoc or an assistant professor position in a good place (not necessarily prestigious, but rather a place where the traits above are promoted) after the doctorate.

Developing rare and valuable skills: deliberate practice

If rare and valuable skills (not pre-existing passion) are the key ingredient for developing a satisfying career… how do we develop such skills? Newport’s answer, drawing from K. Anders Ericsson’s work on expert performance¹, is conceptually simple: deliberate practice. Experts don’t become experts just by innate talent or spending years on the job – they need to practice the job’s key hard skills in a specific way.

Newport focuses on key characteristics: 1) it is specific, working towards well-defined goals and targeting particular aspects of performance (often guided by an expert teacher/coach); 2) It requires full concentration and effort (rather than enjoyable play), practicing at the edge of our abilities (Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development”); and 3) It requires immediate and informative feedback to repeatedly refine our skill.

Ericsson’s deliberate practice theory has its critics², and it’s unclear that this factor is the largest explainer of expert performance, but one thing is clear: practice is probably the largest factor that we have control over (vs. innate talent, working memory, or genetics). The book was sparse on exactly how to do deliberate practice (probably because this looks very different for different fields).

For doctoral students, there’s bad news and good news. The bad news: research tends to be sparse in terms of feedback (journal paper rejections happen infrequently). Further, research is an ill-structured domain with many sub-skills that haven’t been thoroughly systematized, which even expert researchers don’t always fully understand: how to come up with good research questions? Design clever experiments? Write impactful papers? Get published in top journals?

The good news: a PhD puts you in collaboration with an expert (your supervisor), who will (hopefully) provide individualized instruction – which is why it’s important to select your supervisor wisely. Also, we can make our PhD more like deliberate practice. We can create frequent, concrete products (reports about readings or partial results) that look as close to real papers as possible, seeking feedback from supervisors or colleagues; we can ask explicitly about our weaker research skills and advice for improving them. Even the paper writing process we promote here could be seen as decomposing paper writing into manageable, concrete steps, seeking feedback from co-authors more frequently.

Control in a (PhD) job: traps to avoid

Autonomy (or “control”) is a key ingredient in a good job and a key element in self-determination theory. This ability to define what you work on and how you do it helps sustain intrinsic motivation. However, jobs with lots of control are rare, and there are two “control traps” we can fall into:

1. Trying to gain control before we have enough rare and valuable skills (what Newport calls “career capital”). A typical case: becoming a freelance professional without a pre-existing client pool or clear competitive advantage. In a PhD, this trap often takes the shape of thinking we know exactly what research topic to undertake before diving deep into our field – then taking an unrelated job and engaging part-time to avoid being tied to existing projects or supervisor directions. This often means getting a less interested/involved supervisor, less time to develop research skills, and higher dropout chances. A PhD can still be completed under these conditions, but it will be much harder, with less integration in the academic community and fewer chances of a successful research career later on.
2. Once we have enough career capital and we hint that we want more control, our environment (boss, family, friends, colleagues) will offer resistance. We can go with the flow, do the “standard progression,” and never pursue a more autonomous job. At companies, this might mean someone with good technical skills taking higher managerial roles with higher pay (and stress), until they have no time for the technical work they love. In research careers, which often provide autonomy, this trap is harder to spot and depends on our values. The “usual tenure progression” could be one such trap: after developing career capital through PhD and postdoc, we can enter a spiral of high teaching loads and funding pressure throughout the tenuring process, ending up in burnout. A colleague used to say “postdoc life is the best” – if you like doing research without worrying about funding – just it’s not financially stable!

The PhD is a phase where one can enjoy autonomy, if we have a situation and supervisor that lets us define (at least partially) our thesis direction and approach, with flexibility in when and where we do research. Yet, the PhD is a “getting skills” phase, so Newport would probably say we should prioritize positions (and supervisors) where we will learn the most, even if they’re not the most autonomous environments. Still, keep an eye on autonomy aspects in the lab’s everyday work dynamic when interviewing with different supervisors.

This is long enough for a single blog post. There’s still plenty of interesting ideas for doctoral students left in the book to warrant a second post. Stay tuned to read about the role of mission, concrete practices to cultivate “properties of a good job,” and a case study testing whether these ideas generalize. Or, if you cannot wait, just go buy the book and read it :)

Do you find the advice from the book applicable to your own (PhD) life? If not, why not? Let us know in the comments – I’m interested in counterexamples that help us understand the nuances of when and how to apply these ideas!

Header image by ChatGPT4o³.

• Career
• satisfaction
• Autonomy
• Deliberate
• Practice
• Mastery
• Control