His future began to weigh on him.Īfter weeks of restless nights, he realized things needed to change.Īnyone who has experienced anxiety before can empathize.Īccording to the ADAA, roughly 72% of Americans report stress and anxiety that interferes with their workplace performance, interpersonal relationships, and quality of work. He’d accepted a post-doctoral position for September, forcing him to move up the date of his thesis defense.Īt home, he’d ruminate endlessly about work, “ruining any chance at relaxation.” He started fearing he’d be kicked out of graduate school (and, worse, get stabbed to death “in a soup kitchen knife fight”). But by the following spring, things took a turn. His research went well for the first few months. So, he decided to do something different and began trying to prove entirely new results. To him, that sounded like a waste of time. According to Newport, the standard practice in computer science at the time was to take the best results from a collection of peer-reviewed publications, combine them, fill in the missing gaps, and “call the resulting mathematical chimera” a dissertation. In 2008, the 28-year-old MIT student was beginning work on his Ph.D. Photos: Penny Gray Photography (Cal Newport) and Ivan-balvan (licensed from iStockPhoto)
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