Heart

The other day I was reading some forum (or some blog comment, I can't recall) in which the latest U2 album was being discussed. One of the comments expressed more or less the following: 

U2 is the living proof that you don't need great performers to produce great rock songs. Indeed, if you pay attention, Bono doesn't have a great voice, The Edge would be nothing without all the machines and effects he uses, and the drums and bass are only correct. After all, rock is all about attitude.

This duality between innate talent and acquired skills pervades many facets of human life. The immediate examples that come to my mind are soccer players and researchers. Some are talented because they're were born like that; being brilliant is natural (or even instinctive) for them. Think of Maradona here. Others, in contrast, try to compensate the lack of innate talent with additional doses of sacrifice, discipline, or even leadership. Think of Gattuso here. In both cases, our human nature constantly pushes us to the unavoidable search for equilibrium. 

I remembered the comment on U2 while talking with a former supervisor of mine about potential PhD students. Doing a PhD is a serious decision, as it requires a lot of personal compromise. A special sacrifice most likely you haven't faced before. There's no formula or pattern to follow for doing a PhD; after all, it's research: you'll be dealing with issues that no one else has addressed before, so what you ignore is usually much more than what you know for sure. This applies both for the supervisor and the student; each of them doesn't really know what to expect from the other. 

My former supervisor has a theory on potential PhD students: to do a PhD you need something that goes well beyond GPAs and mechanical knowledge acqusition; in his view, above all things, PhD students must have what he generically calls their heart: a rare mix of independence, self-confidence, enthusiasm, audacy, stubborness, curiosity, sacrifice, and passion. As many other intangibles in life, a student's heart can't be easily defined but you can tell for sure when you see it. 

Being one of those endowed with a rather modest amount of innate talent, I can only but agree with this way of understanding what it takes to do research. Although this could well apply to many scenarios in life, when doing research it is especially evident that you need a resiliant heart. Indeed, since doing a PhD is such a unique experience (especially if you go abroad for that) you will need to use your heart in those (frequent) moments in which your academic side has run out of answers. In any case, it could help to think the following: if Bono can sing as wholeheartedly as he does with his limited voice, a good student with the proper amount of heart should succeed in that road to oblivion also known as scientific research.