A Snippet of Wisdom

Before we left for the UK my wife and I joined one of my graduate professors (and dear friend) for dinner with his family at his home. He gave me lots of needed advice about working on my PhD as he himself worked through his at the University of Aberdeen many years ago. One piece of advice he gave me was to make sure that I write something every day. Typically a PhD thesis is around 80,000 to 100,000 words and is to be accomplished by the end of a 3 year period. Realistically, many people take an additional year or so to finish up if necessary. This is a tremendous task when one considers the amount of reading and research necessary, aside from a plethora of other responsibilities and familial duties. In my previous post, Redeeming the Time, I proposed a daily work schedule for myself which I have been implementing to bring balance to the Force. The sheer size of the thesis alone is enough to necessitate writing something every day, but there is also the problem of the quantity of information one analyses during research. It is easy to read and meditate on information for hours. Time flies when your nose is in a book! One potential problem with this is attempting at a later time to recall what you read or what you were thinking. While at dinner my professor told me a splendid Indian proverb that illustrates this truth beautifully:

“Your memory is only as good as the ink in your pen.”

I love that! In other words, if you do not write things down (or type them up, or record them in some manner), then you may forget. Our memories are just not as reliable as we would like them to be. Recording information while it is still fresh in the mind is a superior method for accessing it at a later time than is relying on one’s own memory.

I find this proverb extremely helpful and I have committed it to memory… but I have also written it down. [Insert winking emoticon here]. I repeat it to myself whenever I am reading and feeling too lazy to grab a pen or get my laptop. I have been doing my best to write something every day; even if it is just a quick note or observation I am pondering or reading. I currently have a few large files full of written content, analyses, and notes. This, I hope, will all formulate into a structured thesis quite well in due time. I did something similar when I worked on my MA thesis, but I have to admit that I often did not write things down. I constantly found myself trying to remember the exact place I had read some obscure statement, argument, reference, or other information. It normally took me a while to try relocating it. Sometimes I just couldn’t find it again. At the time I either thought I wouldn’t use it or I was just too lazy to record it. Honestly, I might have just continued that process into my PhD research, as inefficient as it was. It was just my modus operandi. However, when my professor gave me this proverb as one of his most important pieces of advice, I really felt convicted about my previous tendencies. On a positive note, I also became motivated to not let it happen again. I am sure I will miss things here and there, but not nearly as much as before. I have been writing down every observation and thought while working now and I feel a lot more confident. There is plenty I can choose to omit or edit out later, but at least I will not have to go hunting as often for things I read months ago which I could have just taken a few seconds to jot down.

So, if you are a student of any sort, this snippet of wise advice is worth implementing in your daily life. Even if you are not a student, this proverb is certainly applicable. After all, I am sure the origins of this saying were not necessarily within the confines of academia.

I liked that proverb so much that I subsequently conducted an internet search on Indian proverbs. I found quite a few that are clever, practical, and worth memorizing (and writing down, of course). I have come to be fond of Indian proverbs. I have also come to be quite fond of Indian cuisine! But that’s another post for another time.