Got Another PhD

A few days ago, I tied a new belt around my waist — a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

I’ve been practicing jiu-jitsu for more than 10 years. One might beleive I’m a skilled athlete. However, I’m not the top black belt in my weight division, not in my neighborhood, and not even in the gym where I train. That’s fine. What matters is the path and what I learned and pushed through along the way.

For a long time, I thought I would never tie that belt. Jiu-jitsu was never a priority, and as you approach your 40s, life seem to accelerate. Managing training alongside a family with three kids, two jobs, and events such as COVID, injuries, and everything else makes anything outside your critical path harder to keep going.

During part of my PhD, I also believed I would not be able to complete it. Somehow, I did.

Looking in the mirror, these journeys might appear unrelated — one in libraries and struggling with peer-review; the other on the mats, between chokes, sweeps, and being smashed by (often smaller) training partners.

But the deeper I think about it, the more I realize that earning a PhD and earning a black belt are essentially two sides of the same coin.

Progress is slow, nonlinear, and often invisible for long periods.

In both a PhD and in jiu-jitsu, progress rarely feels real while you’re living through it. You show up every day, struggle through complex papers or difficult drills, and feel stuck. Entire months may pass where nothing seems to move, even though you’re pouring effort into the process. I quite remember how hard it was to read and fully understand a few papers on my field. I invested time and effort, but nothing moved forward in the research itself. This lack of visible progress made me fell bad, especially when others appear to be advancing faster than I.

But the truth is that growth happens in the micro. You don’t notice your reasoning sharpening until you reread your early drafts, and think, “oh, how could I write such a bad piece?”. On the mats, you don’t realize your timing is improving until one day you land a sweep to someone who usually gives you trouble. When someone says “good job” — for a paragraph that you wrote or for a technique you performed — they’re reacting to a visible result of many repetitions that stayed unseen.

Plateaus, regressions, sudden breakthroughs — all of these are signs that progress is happening under the surface. Whether you’re fighting with theory or with an opponent, you’re constantly building layers of understanding; they will only make sense over time.

You get “submitted” repeatedly.

Failure is not an accident in either path — it’s the design.

In academia, you are “submitted” by harsh comments, rejected papers, failed experiments, and theoretical dead ends. Reviewer #2 (a joke that refers to someone whose job is to reject your work) might not use an armbar, but the effect of rejecting your deared paper is similar; pain is part of the game 🙂

On the mats, the lessons are more literal. You tap (the signal that the game should stop), again and again, to people who are more technical or simply having a better day. Every submission exposes a gap in your understanding. The mat delivers immediate, honest, and often uncomfortable feedback.

Both worlds teach resilience through repeated defeat.

Reviewer comments push ideas forward; a choke shows where you left space. Over time, you learn to welcome these small issues as part of the process. Every researcher had several paper rejected; Every jiu-jitsu practitioner had tapped hundred of times. Eventually, rejections would not hurt that much anymore. You learn to reset, adjust, and move on. Perhaps your growth is measured by how many times you’re willing to get back on track.

Both require showing up even when motivation disappears.

Motivation comes and goes. If your work depends on motivation, progress stalls.

The real progress happens on cloudy and raining days, when you don’t feel inspired, energized, or confident.

When you are willing to get back to that manuscript that you have been working for 2 years non-stop. You want to see the devil himself but you don’t want to look again at that manuscript; but you do it nevertheless. Or when you force yourself to go training despite fatigue or frustration. Showing up can be the best thing you can do.

Hopefully you become someone who doesn’t depend on emotional peaks to stay committed. You work because the work needs to be done, and no one else will do it for you.

What looks like an ending is actually the beginning.

From the outside, a PhD defense looks like the end of a journey. For anyone who went through it, it marks the start of working as an independent researcher.

You leave knowing a narrow area well, while also realizing how much remains unknown. You may know a couple of research methods – I myself was very familiar with performance experiments. However, the set of tools available out there is richer, and the contexts where they apply vary a lot, which requires a deeper understand of the trade-offs and the conner cases. During the PhD, you rely on an advisor. After that moment, you are on your own. Mentors and colleagues can help with questions, but the direction and the final say will always be yours.

The black belt in jiu-jitsu represents a similar paradox. Many people might assume you have mastered the art. However, your colleagues at the gym know it means you’ve only mastered the fundamentals. You may understand the main positions, transitions, and submissions. I think I was very good in finding and doing ambars from different poistions. However, details remain endless.

Another example: you shouldn’t use the same techniques when fighting someone around your weight and someone weighing 50 kg more than you. Similarly, you need to adapt your game when rolling with a blue belt in their early 20s, full of energy, or with someone who has been a black belt for 30 years. This adaptation is something you have to understand, adjust, and often figure out by yourself. You can have colleagues and mentors, but the direction is still yours.

Is there a finish line?

Getting a PhD (or a black belt) isn’t the finish line. It’s the moment when you realize how much there is still to learn; thus it’s also when refinement really starts. The responsibility only grows, not shrinks. Someone in the mat is now trying to do the same techniques in the way you do. Someone who read your papers is trying to perform the same experiment.

Both milestones signal readiness, not completion (which may not even exist). They mark the moment when you’ve built enough foundation to explore your craft with depth, to contribute to your community, and to pursue mastery with intention.

They also remind you that the learning process should never stop.

Remember that your toolbox is as rich as the professional using it. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Learning to use a hammer matters, but you can only move to more complex problems if you go deeper into the details.

The end is simply an invitation to begin again — at a higher level.