You’re giving a presentation. Mindful that you should ease people into your topic, you start gentle. Things are going great, and then you go to your first example. When planning your talk, you had an easy example, but then you figured that people would think it was too easy. So you added a more complex one, closer to something you were studying in your work.

This, I think, is the next big thing in marketing ourselves.

As a graduate student, I’m no stranger to reading lots of papers. Okay, that’s not quite true. I’m used to reading parts of papers. We don’t tend to go through the whole thing like you might a book. Instead, I’m looking for bits that might be useful for me.

Each day, I wake up, eat a bowl of cereal, and go for a run. Day after day, month after month. The specifics of each run vary, but the repetition is relentless. I do a similar thing with my writing and drawing. I have a schedule and I stick to it, showing up again and again.