A déjà vu: pushing through hard times again. But surely, it will magically end. And it did not. Behold, this is neither self-promotion nor a stabat mater à la academia. But an attempt to analyze what I could have done better.
I was always hustling through school. I tried to seize all opportunities I got. This is what worked the best (seemingly). I could not have been further away from the truth. There were good days, for sure, but even the hard ones proliferating around the end of each term did not make me think something was wrong. I quieted myself repeatedly by saying that it would end soon—and then committed myself to too many things in the next semester again.
That was a big mistake I realized a few months into my Ph.D.:
The hustle will not stop unless the sole responsible soul on this planet will hit the brakes and will shout hands up: "Enough".
You can always work more, but the marginal gains will diminish—you can deceive yourself, like me, that they are still gains—but the price you need to pay is immensely high. I am not against a hard effort, but I needed to learn that giving all you got is not a sustainable strategy over the long term.
Thinking in terms of compound interest, i.e., consistent, sustainable effort is devoid of the instant gratification of seeing progress.
It fools most of humanity—so chisel it into your memory and glue it onto your bathroom mirror; even that will be a hard undertaking, your mind will protest since thinking so far in the future and estimating the long-term effect is nontrivial.
You can think (as I did) that the hustle is only to get into a master’s, then a Ph.D., maybe a postdoc, then a research grant, a competitive job, then a raise, maybe an own company. Then it never ends. Unless, well, you do something about it.