Somewhere between my second year and my third existential crisis, I made a decision: I would stop using other people’s progress as the ruler for my own.
It sounds obvious. It is not easy.
Academia is, structurally, a comparison machine. Lab meetings, conferences, LinkedIn — all quietly nudging you to subtract someone else’s chapter count from yours and call it a deficit. But here’s the thing: we are not running the same race. Your project, your baseline, your circumstances — none of it is the same as the person sitting across from you at journal club.
So I switched the benchmark. Instead of asking “how far along is everyone else?”, I started asking “what can I do today that I couldn’t do three months ago?” Can I read a methods section in half the time? Are my questions sharper? Do I understand this mechanism in a way that would have been completely opaque to me last year? That’s real progress. It’s unglamorous and invisible from the outside — but it compounds.
And honestly, we have tools now that my supervisors never had. AI has quietly become the best study partner a PhD student never knew they needed. I can feed a 40-page paper into Claude and walk away with the core argument in minutes. Literature searches that used to eat entire afternoons now take twenty. Tools like Elicit, Perplexity, and Research Rabbit surface connected papers I’d have otherwise missed entirely. That’s not a shortcut — that’s leverage. Use it. Your job is to think, not to manually hunt citations for three hours.
The PhD will change you. The thesis is just the documentation.
Stop watching the lane next to you. Run your race.
Are you a grad student or thinking about a PhD? How do you measure your own progress? Drop a comment — I’d genuinely like to know.
BreathPharma 