Back in my graduate school days, I had a young, ambitious advisor. He was a good advisor--he cared about my growth as a person, listened deeply to what I said, and taught me a variety of lessons about how to do science.

But one thing that drove me batty was how he would sometimes blow off commitments he had made to the people in his lab. If he told us he would read a draft of our paper by next week, we would be lucky if he had read it by next month, and that was WITH persistent pestering. One of my fellow graduate students, Duane, even posted a sign that said something to the effect of "Go away: I'm reading papers!" on his door in the hopes of scaring would-be distractions away.

I asked my advisor how he organized his time, and his response was that "a consequence of success" is that you have way more balls than you can possibly juggle, and so you need to let some hit the ground. I left that conversation feeling resentful that I was a dropped ball in his world.

Fast-forward a year. I am in a career that I am crazy passionate about, and with that excitement has come a bevy of ideas, opportunities, and fun project ideas. I want to do it all, but would need several lifetimes to do so.

I used to make decisions about what to do and not do by asking myself what was fun and what wasn't... but that system breaks down when most things are fun and exciting. Instead, I now make decisions based on what is most important to me, knowing that, after reeling in some beautiful fish on my fishing rod, I have to release some back into the lake. It's a lot harder to release a fish when it is a beautiful, fat, shimmering trout than when it is an anemic little minnow. But that's what happens when you live on a lake of abundance. Would you have it any other way? The skill to learn, then, is how to be razor-sharp about your priorities and goals, and have the discipline to catch and release.

The other day, I was talking with a fellow ex-labmate, who echoed these same observations about life post-lab. And we both realized that we now understood the world my advisor lived in. He wasn't slacking off, or thinking our papers and projects were inconsequential. His world was one of abundance, and we were two of in sea of shimmering trouts. Given that we were often thrown back into the lake, he must have been reeling in some amazing catches :).

Now, my advisor should have been honest with us about what was really going on: that he wasn't going to read our papers for another few months, for example. And, you could argue, graduate student trouts should be automatically kept, and never thrown back. But at the same time, I feel like I now better understand the world that my advisor lived in, and can appreciate the abundance he must have been experiencing.

Image courtesy of http://naturalpatriot.org/