How to become the world’s leading expert in your field (part 1)

Some people say that getting a PhD means that you’re “the world’s leading expert in your field”, but this is well-meaning nonsense.

It’s well-meaning because it’s meant to give you confidence going into your PhD defence, but it’s nonsense because, if it were true, it would mean that everybody with a PhD would either be the world’s leading expert in a field of one, or, in order to get a PhD, you would have to defeat the current leading expert in some kind of intellectual fight to the death¹. This might be fun to watch, but it would mean that almost nobody would get a PhD.

And even though the advice is meant to boost your confidence, it can easily have the opposite effect if you know deep down that you’re not the world’s leading expert in your field, but think that you should be.

So there are two questions I’d like to address here:

1. What does it actually mean to get a PhD, if not being the world’s leading expert?
   
2. If you did want to become the world’s leading expert in your field, how should you go about it?

What does it mean to get a PhD?

Getting a PhD can have a great deal of personal meaning, which can vary from one student to another. Those meanings are all valid, as long as you don’t tie up too much of your sense of self esteem in the result.

But if we just think about it in terms of the standard you’re expected to achieve and what it might indicate to potential employers, getting a PhD means developing a professional level of competence in academic research. It’s the starting point for a potential academic career, not the culmination of your life’s work, and you should continue to learn and develop your skills long after you graduate.

So as a general rule, if your work is publishable, then it’s enough for a PhD. Some university systems require publications, but even when this isn’t the case, it’s still a good idea to publish if you can (or to at least aim to produce work of a publishable standard).

If you can publish a few papers in good, peer-reviewed journals, then an examiner would need a very good reason to fail you because your work has already passed peer-review. The only reasons why this might happen would be if they uncover any kind of dishonesty, like if it turned out that you hadn’t done the work yourself, or that you’d faked or manipulated results, in which case you wouldn’t really be able to complain about the result.

So getting a few publications is a good idea as it demonstrates a professional level of competence. Getting your first few publications is a big achievement as a PhD student, but it’s also the bare minimum for a professional academic.

This brings us to the second, more interesting question…

If you want to become one of the world’s leading experts in your field, how should you go about it?

To answer this, I’d like to look at two aspects, first the mindset that you adopt, then some specific tools in terms in terms of how you approach your work.

In terms of mindset, the first recommendation is to let go of any kind of impostor syndrome. So many PhD students put themselves under so much pressure that they should already be at a certain level, so they hide away for fear of being found out.

But all this does is keep you from learning, keep you from asking questions and keep you from taking any risks. You’ll likely spend years hiding away in the literature and trying to come up with the perfect plan, without ever developing the practical skills necessary to execute that plan. Then of course when you finally start doing your research, you’ll make a load of mistakes, which will then feed back into that sense of not being good enough…

The way to overcome this kind of impostor syndrome is to accept that, of course, you don’t know what you’re doing, and that you’re here to learn and improve your skills, not to prove how good you already are.

And if you’re open about what you don’t know, then nobody can find you out. You might be worried about what others will think, but most people will like it if you come to work with curiosity and enthusiasm to learn.

If you want to be the best, learn from others

This brings us to the next point. If you want to be the best, then you have to learn from others. The whole reason universities exist is to bring together people with different skills and expertise, so instead of just trying to learn from the literature, learn from those around you, too.

Find out what other people are working on. Read their most recent papers. Ask them questions. Or at the very least learn people’s names and say hello to them in the corridor.

This not only broadens your exposure to different ideas that you never would have found just by reading, it also means you know who to go to if you need help with a specific aspect of your own research, and they’re much more likely to help you if you’ve shown an interest in their work before you needed something from them.

What if people react badly when you ask questions?

But if people around you react badly to you asking questions, then you should go and work somewhere else. If somebody puts you down or reacts angrily or just says, “it’s your PhD, I’m not here to help you”, then they are giving you valuable information about their attitude and character, and you shouldn’t compromise to appease somebody who isn’t interested in helping you.

If your goal is to just get the PhD then maybe you should keep your head down and do what you have to to get through, but our goal here is to become the world’s leading expert, and if the environment isn’t conducive to that goal, if it isn’t serving your needs, then you should change your environment. This is never easy, but If you have high ambitions, then you have to make hard decisions.

So it’s essential to talk to and learn from others, but you should also be careful about who you seek to emulate.

For example, if you see other academics working beyond the point of exhaustion, to the point where they look unwell or miserable or can barely keep up with the workload, that’s probably not the outcome you want.

But if you see someone who works hard, but somehow seems to not only manage the work but enjoy the work, while also reaching very high standards, it might be worth asking them how they do it.

Find your own ways of working, without fear of judgement

And then it’s also important to develop your own ways of working. Look at what others are doing, and where necessary be willing to do the opposite without fear of judgement.

For example, one of the things I started doing towards the end of my PhD was to take a walk around campus whenever I faced a difficult problem in the lab. This gave me time and space to relax and think creatively about the problem, and was one of the key habits that saved my PhD. But if I’d been worried about appearances then I would have stayed in the lab, and maybe rushed a response or switched to working on something else for the sake of appearing busy.

This brings us to the final piece on mindset…

Stay with problems beyond the initial discomfort

If you want to be a world-class researcher, you have to be willing to stay with a problem, beyond any initial discomfort. So often we’ll rush or jump between tasks or procrastinate as a way of avoiding a problem, but these are the moments when you need to be most engaged.

The best researchers get excited about an unexpected puzzle, and they are willing to stick with it, think about it, obsess over it, even, and keep trying different things until they find a solution.

Yes, there are times when you need to put a problem aside, and then when you come back to it the solution might be obvious because the subconscious brain has had time to work on it in the background, but this can only happen if you struggle with it a bit first, rather than abandoning it at the first sign of stress.

I’ll come onto some more specific technical details about skill development in a moment, but before going any further, it’s worth asking yourself if you really want to be a world-class researcher, and why.

Why do you want to be the world’s leading expert in your field?

If it’s just for the status or legacy, it’s better to quit now. If you need people to respect you for your position, then no amount of success will ever be enough. You’ll also constantly worry about being outshone by somebody else, and instead of a life driven by curiosity and excitement to learn (and to help others learn, too), you will end up as one of those superficially successful but deeply insecure academics who’s more interested in preserving their own status than research or teaching. It’s better to the inner work on the gaps in your own self esteem than to pursue that kind of hollow academic career, where you make yourself and others around you miserable

If you want to do it for the interest in the subject, but you don’t enjoy the problem solving, if you don’t enjoy those moments when you don’t know what to do, and you have to think creatively and try lots of different things to find a solution, you won’t enjoy a life in research.

Being an academic is hard enough, and many find it frustrating that they have to deal with all the admin and grant applications and everything else… but if you also don’t enjoy the fundamental research part and the difficult work of problem solving at the edge of knowledge… then why do it? If you don’t enjoy the fight, why step into the ring?

How to develop your research skills

But if you do enjoy it, and you’re driven by curiosity and the desire to learn and share knowledge, how do you develop your research skills to the highest level?

These principles are important because, during your PhD, you largely have to manage your own project. And if we assume that you don’t already have the skills you need, then you need to manage your project in a way that helps you develop those skills.

You might have heard the phrase “practice makes perfect”, or you might understand that you need to challenge yourself in oder to improve, but there’s important nuance to these ideas.
Firstly, it’s not enough to just challenge yourself.

One of the most common mistakes I see among ambitious PhD students is that they set their immediate goals far too high, often in an attempt to prove what they’re capable of.

While it’s good to have ambitious long term goals, if you set your short term goals far in excess of your current ability, you won’t improve. In fact, you might become less capable as you get overwhelmed by the scale of the task you’ve taken on.

I made this mistake right at the start of my first year, when my supervisor asked me to write a literature review, and I decided that I was going to write the best literature review the world had ever seen. But instead of it helping me get to know the literature, it massively undermined my confidence when I failed to live up to the standard I set myself.

Think big, start small, make mistakes

In order to improve in the short term, you need to set yourself a challenge that pushes just a little past what you can already do, so it requires your full effort and focus, but it’s achievable within a relatively short timeframe.

Once you’ve achieved something once, it’s then much easier to repeat- it takes less thought, less effort, less focus, less time, so you can then make the task more and more challenging as your level of skill increases.

So instead of spending years reading and writing and planning, then doing one massive round of data collection, then trying to figure out how to use analysis software on a huge dataset, you can practice all these things on a small scale in the space of a few days or weeks, starting with the simplest possible version, and gradually scaling up.

This also gives you the opportunity to make mistakes, which will be much easier to find, fix and learn from if you’re only adding a little bit of complexity each time, than if you’re trying to do it all in one on the most ambitious scale.

It’s OK to think big, but start small and let yourself make mistakes as you gradually scale up. This alone can make an enormous difference to your PhD, but, again, there is nuance…

The problem with repetition

If we constantly push at the limits of what we can do, we might improve quickly at first, but eventually, inevitably, we’ll hit some kind of block where we stop improving.

It doesn’t matter how much we practice or how hard we work, we just don’t seem to be getting any better.

When this happens you might think that you’ve hit the limits of your talent, but this is unlikely…

With most tasks, you don’t need to do them perfectly. There’s a certain margin of error, where you can do things far less than perfectly but still succeed.

If you then repeat the task again and again, it might seem like you’re getting better at it as repetition helps to establish and reinforce neural pathways in the brain, so you can perform tasks faster and with much less conscious thought.

While this is very useful, it can also engrain bad habits, which then get harder to break the more you repeat them.

And to make it more difficult, when try to do things quickly or under stress then the brain relies more heavily on established patterns. So if the way you’re trying to do something isn’t working, it’s even harder to adapt.

In these situations, the only option is to slow down and work carefully and deliberately, thinking about what you’re doing, instead of relying on instinct.

And the ability to do this, to slow down and think calmly and clearly under pressure is one of the traits of the very best researchers, but we don’t want to wait until the pressure is on to develop this ability.

This next tip is one that makes the difference between people who are good at what they do and the very best…

The secret behind the very best researchers in any field (go back to basics)

The very best, in any field, aren’t the best because of the flashy things they can do. They are the best because of mastery of the fundamentals.

So while they absolutely push themselves and take on steadily greater challenges, they don’t stay at the limits of their ability all the time (or even most of the time).

Instead, no matter how experienced, they keep going back to the basics, trying to perfect the tiniest details, trying to find more efficient ways (or even just different ways, of doing things they already know how to do.

In other words, they maintain a beginner’s mindset, with the curiosity and the humility to go back to basics again, and again, and again.

This is often where the major breakthroughs happen, when somebody re-examines what was previously taken for granted, but it’s also crucial for continual skill development.

Mastery of the fundamentals and the limits of talent

When I was an undergraduate physics student, in the first year everybody had to take foundational mathematics modules. This made sense, as mathematics is the language of physics, but the pass mark was 40%.

This meant that you could scrape through knowing less than half the material. But even someone who did exceptionally well, scoring, say, 90%, still wouldn’t know 10% of the syllabus. They would be fine going into the next module, or the next, but eventually that slightly weak foundation would crack.

If I knew then what I know now, then I would have kept taking that exam (or past papers) until I could reliably score 100%, every single time, because it would have made the rest of the degree (and my PhD and postdoc career after that) so much easier.

I wouldn’t have become the world’s leading physicist, in part because for certain skills, like chess or mathematics or theoretical physics, you need to start young to reach the very highest level. Also, at the very top, when we’re talking about the undisputed best, innate talent is a factor.

But the limit of your talent probably isn’t where you think it is, and while you probably won’t become the world’s leading expert in your field, you can use these same principles to get very, very good at what you do, and to have a meaningful, fulfilling, and enjoyable career.

1. See, for example: The Thesis Defence by Studio C ↩︎