My learning manifesto

I started a PhD late, at the age of 37.

What followed were six and a half brutal years of balancing work, studies, family life, mental sanity, and physical health, up to my graduation at the age of 44. Halfway through the program, I also signed up for a Harvard certification in data science, as I needed to acquire enough coding proficiency in R to complete my quantitative research, and which compounded my workload for a couple of years.

I've often been asked about my motivations for subjecting myself to such pain and financial expense at an otherwise stable and comfortable stage of my professional life. I can now think of several reasons for lifelong learning and continued education, even if I had perhaps not crystallized them so clearly in my head at the time. I discuss them briefly below, in no particular order.

1. The fractal nature of knowledge. I had been specializing in air transport for many years as a management consultant. Among my peers in consulting, I was already perceived as a niche subject matter expert. And yet, the more I learned about the industry, the more I uncovered new branches of knowledge spreading out in fractal fashion. I discovered that there is no end to how much one can learn about any topic.

2. The imposter syndrome. Related to this first point is the fact that my positioning as a niche advisor naturally led me to interact with industry practitioners who had dedicated their career to various segments of the aviation value chain. These people possessed what I did not: practical industry experience and accountability for their strategic initiatives, and the battle scars that came with it. Facing them, I occasionally felt insufficiently familiar with their practices, business issues, and jargon. I felt that I needed to gain more credibility.

3. Academic inflation. The value of a degree is never as great as the day you earned it. I had obtained my Masters and my MBA some 18 years prior, and in that timeframe, I had witnessed the increasing demand for degreed talent for a given level of employment, due to the democratization of higher education, a (presumed) lowering of the bar at less prestigious institutions, the changing nature of middle-skills jobs, and an increasing reluctance by employers to invest in quality talent below the graduate level. Jobs that once required a high school diploma now require a bachelor; those that once required a bachelor now consider a masters to be the bare minimum. I was even seeing more and more postings requiring doctorates for jobs that I could hardly imagine would need one. This phenomenon, known as academic inflation, was another impetus for me to keep up academically.

4. The limits of knowledge retention. Related to the erosion in degree value is that, over time, we simply forget what we have learned if we don't actively put it to use. In those two decades, I had used only a fraction of my graduate education and my memory of the rest was fading. Simply put, I was worried about my natural rate of unlearning exceeding my rate of new learning.

5. The half-life of knowledge. Half-life is the time it takes for a fissile material to lose half of its radioactivity; after seven half-lives, less than one percent of it remains. Knowledge, economist Fritz Machlup argued in 1962, also follows an exponential decay. Much of what I learned in my graduate programs in the late 1990s is either no longer relevant or has been superseded by more modern concepts. With so much societal and business change happening around me, I felt the need to "update my software".

6. Planning the landing. David Rubenstein, cofounder of the Carlyle Group, supposedly said that the secret to life was to win the second half, not the first. In many ways, I believe that universities prepare students suitably well for the first 20 years of their career, but not for the next 20, as the required skills transition from those of individual contributors to those of team managers and, eventually, to those of leaders of entire organizations. To prepare for the second half of my career, I felt the need to enroll in either an executive management program or a terminal degree.

7. The man in the mirror. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge revealed internal motivators, which helped me remain committed to the end of this grueling academic journey, especially when the temptation to drop out was at its peak. One such motivator was, plainly, to inject more intellectual stimulation into my life. Another was proving to myself (and, perhaps vainly, to others) that I had the mettle to climb this metaphorical Everest.

8. The joy of intellectual pursuits for their own sake. Lastly, and related but distinct from the previous point, is that I very much enjoy learning. If I could re-roll the cosmic dice, I would do so until I could become the knowledgeable generalist I can only ever aspire to be, and live the life of the polymath aristocrat of the Enlightenment; he who, freed from the necessities of working for a living, can dedicate his time maximally toward learning about the worlds both seen and unseen.