The End-game: Finishing Your Doctorate

Abstract

Down the ages dispassionate observers have long complained that intellectuals are diffident, unbusiness-like types. They are happy to start projects but reluctant to finish them. Interested in books and ideas and potentialities, they are perfectionists who cannot close a deal, cannot say ‘this is good enough’, cannot easily make a sale or cut a compromise. It is a familiar and discomforting stereotype, which unfortunately has a large measure of truth (certainly in my case). If writing is psychologically difficult as a form of commitment, how much more troubling is the letting go involved in ceasing to work on a project, recognizing that its imperfections and deficiencies (so intimately familiar to the author) have just to be lived with, tolerated, perhaps never remedied or improved upon?

The tension between making it better and getting it done appears wherever people have work to finish or a product to get out: a computer, a dinner, a term paper, an automobile, a book. We want to get it done and out to the people who will use it, eat it, read it. But no object ever fully embodies its makers’ conception of what it could have been.

Howard Becker ¹

The art of writing does, in fact, give to those who have long practised it habits of mind unfavourable to the conduct of affairs. It makes them subject to the logic of ideas … It gives a taste for what is delicate, fine, ingenious and original, whereas the veriest commonplaces rule the world.

Alexis de Tocqueville ²