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1. One thing that I think about more as I get older is how to sustain the curiosity, focus, & drive that is required from a successful scientist over a very long career. The problem is that we train earlier on in our careers to be sprinters but we need to become marathon runners.
2. The early part of a typical PI career (grad school/postdoc/pre-tenure PI) is very intense & stressful. It encourages the adoption of work habits that, even though they vary from person to person, are often not very compatible with a long-term sustainable career in science.
3. These habits may include workoholicism, neglecting friends/loved ones/hobbies, working on stuff that you don’t love but can get you a job, not taking care of yourself very well, putting up w/ toxic work environments that are beneficial to your career, living somewhere you hate
4. If you are lucky enough to get a job & eventually tenure w/ time these bad habits become a liability. This is made worse by the fact that the demands of post tenure life are in some ways worse, often more teaching, more service, higher expectation of productivity & mentoring.
5. Failure to confront & change these bad habits (that may have helped get you tenure) can have pretty negative effects on people’s mental health & their ability to function as successful scientists. This manifests as a sort of a mid-career crisis or burnout for some people.
6. When I was a postdoc an older PI confided in me how difficult they found it to become engaged & excited in the work being done in their (productive & successful) lab. This was something I thought about a lot subsequently & got me thinking about some of my own bad habits.
7. This career is cyclical & repetitive. You develop projects, realise & publish them. People come in, grow to be independent scientists & leave. You write grants, they get rejected, you re-apply. classes to teach, committees to sit on. You will write many many different letters.
8. It takes an ongoing investment of time & work to make this long, cyclical, repetitive career sustainable, enjoyable, & fun over the long-haul. Importantly, we also have to work to change science & make it easier for scientists to stay healthy & happy throughout their career.
