Brilliance
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but there’s just a special connection you have with other PhD students. I imagine there’s a similar notion for those studying medicine, law, dentistry, pharmacy, etc. There’s a mutual understanding of the rigor of the program, similar gripes over research, a bonding over the emotional and psychological distress of coursework, and/or the horror stories of the dissertation. As much as I feel that connection with other PhD students, there’s an even deeper sense of connection I have with other doctoral students that are men and women of faith. Beyond everything I just described, there’s the spiritual commonality we share as well. Indeed, 70 to 80 hours of reading, writing, research, and schoolwork a week can take a spiritual toll, and it’s definitely not for the faint of heart.
As you can imagine, then, I was pretty enthused when I had the opportunity May 2018 to reconnect briefly with a sister in Christ in Philly, completing a PhD in Education. Like many people who I hadn’t seen in awhile, she asked me how school was going, and like many people I hadn’t seen in awhile, I told her I was getting absolutely DRAGGED. And it showed, too. I was 25 pounds lighter. And I imagine I didn’t look like my usual self. Everybody kept asking about it; in so many words, I was told I looked sick on many occasions. I had a short conversation with my friend, but it was uplifting. Over three years later, I still remember the scripture she directed me towards. It was Daniel 1:17.
Let’s start with some context.
The book of Daniel opens with Judah’s captivity in Babylon. In short, the Southern Kingdom of the Jews, Judah, was attacked, and defeated, by the Babylonians. As was common practice at the time, the Babylonians took the Jews back with them to Babylon as captives. King Nebuchadnezzar must have been an enterprising man, because he decides to start a leadership development program, three years in length. His plan is to take the best and brightest of the Jews, bring them to his palace, and develop them as leaders (there was definitely an element of indoctrination, too, but we don’t have time to get into that). Following completion of the King’s leadership development program, these men would assume prominent roles of influence all across Babylon, even though they’re Jewish and they really should be in more of a minor role, as street merchants for instance.
Maybe I’ll pause here.
I like the book of Daniel for a lot of different reasons, but let me be clear in saying the following: the first chapter of the book of Daniel, for sure, parallels my current life in many different ways. King Nebuchadnezzar decides he’s going to roll out this intensive leadership development program. It doesn’t sound that different from a PhD. The king’s program is 3 years in length, whereas a PhD program is 4 to 8 years, depending on your discipline, your dissertation, and how good your advisor is. The King’s program had education as the primary focus, teaching them literature, language, and more. A PhD program will have you reading 300 pages a week and socialize you to speak, think, and interact the way academics in your field do. Finally, all of this is paid for, presumably, by the king, who has a vested interest in training future leaders. In a PhD program, your tuition, in full, is generally paid for by the university (albeit this may not be the case, if the program has less funding). Additionally, in my case, they pay for dental, vision, and medical insurance, in addition to all of my student fees. In fact, the only school related thing I’ve paid for since starting my PhD is on-campus parking (~$600 per year). Literally, at the close of 5 years, God willing, I’ll have a PhD, and the only thing I’ll have paid for is to park my car on campus. Finally, the program is in residence. As far as I can tell, all participants of the program would live in the King’s quarters, in the same way all PhD students relocate to the university they’ll be studying at.
Yes, it would seem Nebuchadnezzar’s program isn’t that different from an advanced degree of some kind.
It takes me back to when I was applying to my current university. Like Nebuchadnezzar, the Dean of the PhD program wanted the best and the brightest. After accepting me, during my visit to the program, the dean told me, “We received ‘REDACTED NUMBER HERE’ applications this year, and you’re one of our top three candidates.” Much like Nebuchadnezzar, they saw something in me that made them want to bring me to the “palace”. In fact, they were willing to invest in feeding me and educating me for the next 5 years. They felt that good about me as a student. There’s much that could be said about this, but maybe I’ll primarily highlight 2 observations. I appreciate Shondrika for encouraging me with these thoughts, during our very, very short conversation. Much of what comes next was inspired by her uplifting words to me.
“Everyday of your program, you need to pray for people to see something in you.”
The irony of my entire recruiting experience is that I was recruited as one of the top applicants to the program, but my performance in year 1 was probably the worst of all the students that came in my year. Literally, I was at the bottom of my class in every sense of the word. I think the only leg up I had was that English was my first language, which wasn’t true for most of my classmates. But other than having exceptional English, I was skunking it up. Now for context, my particular experience was highly circumstantial. Most people will perform at an average level doing most things, because, by definition, that’s what the average represents: it’s an expected value. But as much as we may hate the idea, we’ll all have situations where our performance is lackluster, and we’ll all have stretches of our career where our best performance is only average. I think this is exactly why Shondrika’s comment was so profound.
People can still see something in you, even when there’s not much to see at that particular moment in time.
If you look at Daniel 1:4, we get a rough idea of what the king was looking for. People without blemish. Good appearance (whatever that means… I suppose if you’re a leader, it helps if you’re nice to look at?). Skillful in all types of wisdom. Endowed with knowledge and understanding. Competent enough to stand before the king. I think this criteria is intuitive enough. What we don’t gather from this passage, though, is how King Nebuchadnezzar went about assessing any of this. Did he administer an exam? Was there an interview of some sort? Maybe he sent them to the psychics for a palm reading (that probably wouldn’t have been out of the ordinary). Or MAYBE, King Nebuchadnezzar just trusted his gut. Maybe Daniel, and his friends (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego), were selected because they simply had the favor of God.
It wouldn’t be the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of.
A PhD program is hard to finish without support. You need an advisor who believes in you, as a student and a researcher. You need faculty members who believe in the merit of your work. You need a dean who believes you’re going to graduate from that program and elevate its prestige with all the amazing things you’ll do professionally. You need a department that believes that the program, as a whole, is BETTER because you accepted an offer to study there. You need people to see something in you. Once people lose faith in you, you’re in a really, really tough spot. If people don’t see anything in you, they cut their losses and stop investing.
People HAVE to see something in you.
I appreciate Shondrika directing me to this text because she was reminding me, even though I was skunking it up, all I needed was for faculty members to continue to believe in me. It’s kind of like that accomplished quarterback in college football who gets drafted to the NFL, and he throws an interception his very first play of the game. And after that, in the next possession, he gets sacked and fumbles the ball. And after that, in the next possession, he gets a 3 and out. Admittedly, it’s not unusual to have a tough transition to the NFL. That’s true for lots of college quarterbacks, even the ones that were EXCEPTIONAL at the college level. But what you need are coaches who continue to believe that drafting you as a quarterback was, 100%, the right decision. Even if your first few possessions suck.
I know what you’re thinking.
It’s entirely possible that your performance has been nothing like mine. Maybe you’ve been exceptional since day 1. Spotless performance. Rave reviews from everyone you work with. That’s great, but it’s not that simple. Even if you’re performing exceptionally well, it doesn’t matter if people don’t see you as performing exceptionally well. Think about the glass ceiling, right? The glass ceiling has been studied across the social sciences, in psychology, sociology, and management, broadly. Women get into these occupations, do otherwise exceptional work, but they don’t advance to managerial roles. How do we make sense of such a peculiar paradox? There are many, many reasons why, but one explanation is people don’t see women as leaders, even when they perform at an exceptionally high level at their work. We usually have a particular vision in our head of what a leader looks like, and it may not include people who are women.
The Bamboo Ceiling works very similarly to the glass ceiling. Again, this has been an area of research as well, both in social psychology as well as organizational behavior. Asian immigrants come to the US, perform exceptionally well in school, frequently earn more than one degree, do an awesome job at work, but for whatever reason, they’re overrepresented in lower levels of organizations and underrepresented in management. One of the reasons why is because, unfortunately, we usually don’t see Asian Americans as leaders, even when they perform at a really high level at work. Again, we usually have a particular vision in our head of what a leader looks like (and maybe sounds like), and it may not include people who are Asian.
I think the implication is simple. When I say, “pray for people to see something in you,” that isn’t just a prayer for when you’re underperforming or skunking it up. You could actually be doing a stellar job. In fact, I hope you are. But if people don’t see something in you, it actually doesn’t matter how well you’re performing. Period.
People have to see something in you. Thanks for that, Shondrika. She gave me one other nugget, too.
“Pray to be brilliant.”
On the surface, that may sound a little bit pretentious, but I don’t think that’s true at all. If you look at verse 17 of chapter 1 (which is what Shondrika told me to do), the Bible actually says God gave Daniel and his friends learning and skill in all literature and wisdom. Hey, sounds good to me. A PhD is a very thoughtful exercise. You have to think. You have to think long and you have to think hard and you have to think a lot. And then you write about all the things you’re thinking, and then people tell you all the reasons why what you think doesn’t make any sense, and then you do it all over again.
And you do that for 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or maybe even 9 years. And once you graduate, you get a job as a Professor, where you do the exact same thing. The difference will be you’re paid a salary, to compensate you for all your hard thinking, and you’re teaching other students how to think, too.
Again, I hope this doesn’t sound pretentious, but you need a lot of intellectual horse power in order for this to work. There are days when I don’t even want to show up for school because I feel like I don’t have the mental capacity to perform. And if I can’t think in this line of work, I might as well not even show up. I have to be really thoughtful in order to do this… not even kidding.
It’s hard. It’s definitely doable. But it’s hard.
So, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is I absolutely, 100%, believe that I’m brilliant. I do. I think you have to, really, otherwise you run the risk of not being able to perform in this line of work. You have to believe that you’re brilliant. The good news is I, 100%, believe that I’m brilliant. The bad news is I’m not always brilliant. I think most of the world subscribes to intelligence (or brilliance) as a trait. You understand what I mean by trait, right? For instance, think of personality traits. Our personality traits represent who we are, but more importantly, one of the things that make personality traits personality traits is that they don’t really change much over time. And obviously there’s a combination of nature and nurture, but we do believe that personality traits are relatively stable traits and they don’t necessarily change all that much over time, certainly not in our adulthood.
I think a lot of people tend to think about brilliance the same way: some people are just really brilliant. I mean, they got the juice. End of story. And if you don’t have the juice, you just don’t have it. I do think there’s some truth to that. I think some people are very gifted and adept at learning. They think in very thoughtful, creative, and profound ways. They soak up information and interpret it incredibly well. They’re just really talented in that regard.
Sure, I think that’s true to some extent.
But I much more strongly think of brilliance as a system of thinking and behavior.
I need to be thoughtful.
I need to have insight.
I need to identify puzzles.
I should see paradoxes that may go unnoticed by others.
I need to make connections that others haven’t been able to make, previously.
I need to be articulate.
I should be able to beautifully express my observations, in both written and oral communication.
I need to be daring.
I need to be profound.
I need to radically take on challenges, arguments, and explanations that others dismiss as too ambitious.
I need to be brilliant. TODAY and EVERY day.
In that sense, I liken brilliance to creativity. You may be a creative person, but that certainly doesn’t mean that everything you do is creative. In truth, some things you do are probably a lot more creative than others. We may also, erroneously, assume that if everything you do is creative, that must mean you’re a creative person, but if a creative person stops producing creative things, are they still creative? Hmmm. So, maybe it’s better to think of creativity as what we do, rather than who we are.
I make an almost identical argument for brilliance. It’s not about who we are. It’s about what we do. In that sense, almost anybody has the capacity to be brilliant. It’s not exclusive to people with lots of degrees, or an education at an Ivy League school, etc. It’s also not specific to people of a particular racial or ethnic group or gender, although this has certainly been a heated point of discussion in the past (a discussion that’s beyond the scope of what we focus on here). It goes without saying, sociohistorically, brilliance has been associated with some groups of people more than others, chiefly white men (and there’s some research that supports that, too). But I’m committed to the notion that brilliance is what we DO. It’s simply a system of thinking and behavior. And if I can reproduce that on a consistent basis, people may assume that means I’m brilliant, but in actuality, all I’m doing is reproducing a system of thinking and behaving, every single day.
Here’s the kicker, though.
I need God to help me do that. If you look at Daniel 1:17, it says Daniel’s learning, skill, and wisdom came from God. God enabled him to be brilliant. Without that divinely inspired brilliance, I’m not sure how things would have worked out for Daniel and his friends. So, in my case, it’s not like God gifted me with brilliance 28 years ago and now I never have to worry about brilliance ever again.
On the contrary, I need God to enable me to be brilliant. Day in and day out. He’s the only one that can make this work.
With Him, I can be insightful, and creative, and daring, and provocative, and articulate, and thoughtful, and radical, and expressive, and profound, and function at a very high intellectual capacity, but without Him, reproducing this system of thinking and behaving, consistently, is somewhat of a stretch.
Yes, I believe I’m brilliant, but not because of who I am or where I go to school or what I research. I’m brilliant because God enables me to be brilliant. My prayer, then, is for Him to allow for me to be brilliant on a consistent basis. Otherwise, operating in this line of work is going to be rather difficult.
There’s lots of other interesting nuggets in Daniel, but I think this notion of brilliance from God, and being spiritually minded in an unspiritual environment (read Daniel 1:8-16), are the themes that resonate with me the most.
I appreciate Shondrika sharing some great insight with me in a very, very short conversation. If you don’t have some spiritually minded professionals in your network to chop it up with and get support from when you’re skunking it up, you’re missing out. You gotta get that, IMMEDIATELY. Only God knows where I would be without it.
I appreciate people like Mia. People like Octavia. People like Ty Ty. Or Amanda. Or Gabby. All PhD students, trying to walk with God in this crazy academic journey.
Feel free to weigh in.
Nnamdi