Just start.

We’ve all been there.

Faced with a daunting and complicated project (thesis, book, building a house, the list goes on), or a whole bunch of projects, you start suffering from an acute sort of brain deadlock, freezing like an antelope in the headlights of the rapidly approaching deadline pick-up truck, yeehawing redneck behind the steering wheel.

Perhaps even worse than the freezing, is the procrastination. You somehow manage to start moving, except that you’re pouring all your energy into everything but the work that you actually need to do. You manage record numbers of facebook / twitter / google+ posts, and you attain mastery of coin-knuckle-rolling (marketable skill #1), but the day ends with you having made no further progress.

“Procrastination” by Viktor Hertz on flickr.

Both of these responses, infuriating as they may be, are completely natural. The mountain of work seems too high to surmount on time, or there seems to be more complexity than we can cognitively contain, so we simply avoid it in one way or the other.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution: Just start.

Well duh, you say, of course you need to start somewhere. However, what I’m proposing is slightly more subtle. It’s more of a humble and honest life philosophy:

When faced with a daunting project of any size, deliberately and explicitly forget about completing the project. Focus only on making a start. It can be a small start, even an half-hour of focus will do the trick. Pick the most meaningful thing to start on. Take a break. Then do exactly the same. Make another start, and take a break. Look back, remind yourself that that’s another half an hour of good work that is now DONE. Keep on doing this, and keep on telling yourself: “I’m just going to make a another start, nothing big.” By the end of the first day, you will have noticed that all this starting has resulted in output, but far less anxiety and debilitation. You should also have noticed that your attitude with regard to your project has changed for the better.

Continue to focus on starting. Practise picking the most meaningful or important thing to start on. Eventually, you’ll finish your project by starting on it enough times, and soon you will be that person: The one who gets their stuff done.

(This post is inspired by Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit, by the Pomodoro technique, and by my own experience keeping on starting until stuff is done.)

Dear Academia, I hope we can still be friends.

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After many great years in academia, I finally decided in October of last year to resign from my position as tenured assistant professor. As of February of this year, I proudly walk the earth as an independent engineer.

It has taken me two years of thinking to reach this decision.

I started re-evaluating my life in academia two years ago after a review-for-promotion process that resulted in a “not quite yet” judgement. It took this long to make my decision, because it was actually going quite well. I had tenure, the holy grail (well, the first of a number of them) for many academics. I had built up and was heading the TU Delft Medical Visualization research group. I was fortunate to attract the best postgraduate students and Ph.D. candidates. My research proposals were successful, so I had money to explore exciting new research avenues. My h-index was (slowly) going in the right direction. Even my teaching was more than occasionally positively received. :)

However, after all this thinking I was finally able to admit to myself that I am a much better engineer than an academic. All of these years, I had been applying my engineering talent to the design problem that is academia. This was successful to a certain extent, but I would never be able to compete with a Real Academic(tm).

More importantly, life is short. It makes sense, and is much more enjoyable, to spend the largest possible part of it running at full efficiency.

Quickly after this realisation, came the next one: I had sub-consciously been working on a fairly respectable engineering-oriented CV and a great network. I now had the freedom to work for… MYSELF. I could get back to designing and building advanced technical artefacts that people actually use, and I could do so completely on my own terms.

It was definitely not easy to leave academia. The hardest part is leaving behind the relationships I was privileged to have with my colleagues (friends), in Delft and the rest of the world. Of course we will still have contact, but it will never be the same as the 15:30 sugar fix, the caffeine-driven and super-esoteric debates in the kitchen, the ultra-weird lunch discussions, or the awesome conversations and beer-drinking at scientific (haha) conferences.

That being said, the wave of creative energy I have been riding on for the past month, even after correcting for novelty, is a good sign that my choice was a suitable one. I am happy and relieved to call myself an engineer again.

So Academia, it’s really not you, it’s me. :)

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Startups vs. Academic Research Groups: FIGHT!

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There are many similarities between startups, defined here as (relatively) young and agile companies with a few bright people trying to change the world by working on some cool idea(s), and academic research groups, defined here as (relatively) young and agile units within academic institutes with a few bright people trying to change the world by working on some cool idea(s). Err, yes.

Fortunately there are also many differences, so I have something to write about here. For some years now I’ve been running the TU Delft Medical Visualization research group, an experience that shall serve as the primary source of information for this piece. I’ve also had some experience of startup culture, first as one of two (and later three) engineers in a new business unit of Crusader Systems (now CSense) designing an embedded image processing product called FrothMaster, then at Stone Three as employee #1, then later at Treparel as a co-founder and architect, and more recently as scientific advisor to Clinical Graphics and co-founder of TimeScapers. In spite of this healthy dose of exposure, I’ve never actually run a startup as my main activity, so I will have to extrapolate and sometimes revert to wild guesses. I am trusting that some of the startup-involved readers will pipe up in the comments!

An academic research group works more or less as follows: Someone, usually a member of faculty (in this case me) at some university has a number of (crackpot) research ideas. Said someone pours buckets of sweat into further developing these ideas into over-detailed research proposals, which are then all rejected by the national and international research funding agencies that they are sent to. Somehow, said someone manages to keep going at this, resulting in proposals that describe projects that have nothing to do any more with the original research ideas, but are works of buzz-word art.

At some point, to the complete surprise of said someone, a number of proposals get approved. This means that buckets of money are handed over to the hosting university. Doh. Faculty member can now put in official requests to make use of these funds to employ a number of bright Ph.D. candidates for 4 years each, to buy toys for said candidates and to pay for visits to parties, I mean conferences, all around the world. Ph.D. candidates work on research project, supervised by faculty member, and each publishes on average 4 good research papers, followed by a thesis, at which case they usually have to be kicked out.

Some of the freshly-minted doctors decide to stay in academia, eventually breaking out of their postdoc cocoons as beautiful faculty members themselves, most often at other academic institutes. Some of the rest even decide to start startups!

At a startup, the main goal is to develop a new product or service, and then sell so much of it that the company turns a huge and sustainable profit. Alternatively, the startup’s product or service and/or people are so sexy that a much larger company decides to buy the whole thing up for a very large bundle of cash, instantly making the founders quite rich. This is called an “exit”. Initial funding strategies vary greatly. Startups can have any mix of bootstrapping (generating little bits of income to feed itself hopefully leading to more income), self financing, venture capital or angel investment. A startup is “ramen profitable” when it is just able to pay for the founders’ living expenses.

Financing: Here we see the first significant difference. In academia, a competition upfront determines whether you get financing or not for a particular research idea. Only when you have sufficient financing to appoint people and buy equipment for the duration of the project (generally 2 to 4 years), the relevant project is allowed to start. Faculty salaries are paid by the hosting institute. A startup can start whenever at least one founder is able to get by on their own resources for a few months. The startup is able to get by on very little, but does need to generate income throughout its lifetime, and that income ideally needs to increase steadily so that the company can grow.

Risk: The second big difference is related to this. At a startup, all the rewards go to the startup, for a largest part to its founders and to a lesser extent to its employees. People work their behinds off, because the payoff could be huge and your chunk is considerable. If your idea happens to change the world (see Dropbox), also the non-monetary kick can be life-changing. However, the risk is also all yours. If your idea bombs and your company blows up into a million pieces, you get to keep each and every piece! Even worse, you actually have to deal with the fallout in some or other fashion. In practice, this could mean bankruptcy of the company, but it could even go as far as directly impacting on the financial status of the founders.

In academia, there is certainly some risk in exploring in new territory, but it is accepted that not all ideas pan out equally well. You’re allowed to fail now and then, as long as you do OK on average. If you fail all the time of course, you’ll probably have a harder time finding new grants and collaborators to continue with your research, but you’ll still have the job. On the other hand, your reward in case of a successful project is that the relevant publications get mentioned by other researchers in their articles. You now have made what is called “impact”, and your h-index will hopefully start reflecting this soon, making it ever so slightly easier for you to get that next research grant. On a less cynical note, you sometimes are privy to the real kick of scientific discovery, where you’ve managed to cook up something that other scientists (and maybe in 20 years some real people) get really excited about. This latter aspect is in my opinion the actual driver, and the aspect that can make the science business so addictive.

Focus: A startup needs to have laser sharp focus. You need to pick one thing, service, expertise, product or concept, and become the absolute best at that. This seems to be a recurring theme looking at successful startups. If you do decide to go do something else, you have to call it a “pivot“, but you cant’t do too many of those, else people think you don’t know what you’re doing. In academia, you should definitely also have a research focus, but the requirements are far less stringent.

Research groups usually have a number of independent research projects, all more or less exploring some general research avenue, but a good devil’s advocate could claim that having different projects constitutes a lack of real focus. In my group for example, I currently have 6 major projects, ranging from surgical planning, through anatomical modelling and neuro-imaging to population imaging, as well as a small number of less major projects. This range is both a blessing and a curse. I have the luxury of exploring and finding cross-links between related but discrete research lines. Also, we have a higher chance of striking gold and a lower risk of striking out with this spread. However, sometimes I think that picking one idea and working on that for a few years would help us to build up more expertise concentration.

Overheads: Usually an academic research group is embedded within a hosting university. This grants certain advantages, such as infrastructure, and thousands of highly skilled colleagues, but it also means extra overhead. One of the most time-consuming components of this is teaching, an activity with which I have a love-hate relationship. Students who put in the minimum of effort drain a huge deal of energy per each of their completely useless kilograms. Dedicated students on the other hand are energising and in some cases decide to join the research group, further bolstering its capabilities.

In a startup, there is usually no hosting institution, and hence no such kind of overhead. I think this generally contributes significantly to the work satisfaction experienced by startuppers, as the level of self-determination is perceived to be much greater due to the lack of any externally imposed constraints. The impression I get from colleagues at my academic institute, is that the constraints or parameters imposed by the hosting institute, including administration, politics and in some cases teaching, can negatively impact on work satisfaction.

Goals: This one is interesting to think about. I think in both cases the idealistic goal is to discover or create something big that changes the world for the better. Taking a more cynical look at the day to day activities, one could think that the major goal of a research group is to setup larger and larger research programmes involving more and more people and more ambitious research goals, until finally the people at the top lose touch with the work on the ground. The cynical startup founder wants to get rich, either via a fabulous exit or market success, and then do it all again, perhaps at a larger scale.

I think it’s even more important to look past both lofty idealism and cynicism, and instead focus on something that can sustain you indefinitely: Doing something meaningful. Even if that world-changing breakthrough (startup or academia) is not yet in sight, and the bags of cash or the 50-person research group are a really long way off, coming home after work with the conviction that what you’ve done today in some way positively impacts the little world around you will definitely help to keep that spring in your step.

Nerd-alert: Ubuntu Linux 12.04 on my NVIDIA Optimus Samsung NP300V3A laptop