Pardis’s Patience

“I think you do need passion to be happy,” Pardis Sabeti told me. At first this sounds like she’s supporting the passion hypothesis that I debunked in Rule #1. But then she elaborated: “It’s just that we don’t know what that passion is. If you ask someone, they’ll tell you what they think they’re passionate about, but they probably have it wrong.” In other words, she believes that having passion for your work is vital, but she also believes that it’s a fool’s errand to try to figure out in advance what work will lead to this passion.

When you hear Pardis’s story, the origin of this philosophy becomes clear. “In high school, I was obsessed with math,” she told me. Then she had a biology teacher whom she loved, which made her think that biology might be for her. When she arrived at MIT, she was forced to choose between math and bio. “It turns out that the MIT bio department has an unbelievable emphasis on teaching,” she explained. “So I majored in bio.” With a bio major came a new plan: She decided she was destined to become a doctor. “I perceived myself as someone who cared about people. I wanted to practice medicine.”

Pardis did very well at MIT, won a Rhodes Scholarship, and used it to go earn her PhD at Oxford. She focused on biological anthropology, a typically archaic Oxfordian name for a field most would simply call genetics.

It was at Oxford that Pardis decided that Africa and infectious diseases were also a potentially interesting topic to study. If you’re keeping count, this was the third field that at some point in her student career attracted her—the full list now contains math, medicine, and infectious disease. This is why she’s wary of the strategy of trying to identify your one true calling in advance—in her experience, lots of different things can, at different times, seem compelling.

Given her new interest in Africa, Pardis joined a research group using genetic analysis to help African-Americans trace their genealogy back to regions of Africa. After a year or so, Pardis decided to switch labs, and she moved into another, suggested by a friend. This lab was tackling the genetics of malaria.

After Oxford, Pardis returned to Harvard Medical School to earn her MD—amazingly, even as she was finishing up a PhD in genetics, she wasn’t ready yet to abandon her earlier premonition that she was somehow meant to be a doctor. The result was that she became a young med student finishing a PhD thesis during her spare time. “If you want to write a thing about having a quality enjoyable life, don’t ask me about my time at Harvard,” she warned. “Harvard was a tough time.”

Pardis finished her dissertation and became a postdoctoral fellow, continuing to juggle this work with the end of her MD program, taking the subway back and forth between Harvard and MIT, where she was now working at the Broad Institute with the famed geneticist Eric Lander. It was during this period that her ideas about using statistical analysis to find evidence of recent human evolution begin to yield results, culminating in the 2002 publication of a major paper in Nature with the innocuous title: “Detecting recent positive selection in the human genome from haplotype structure.”²

According to Google Scholar, the work has been cited over 720 times since its publication. “People started treating me differently after that paper,” Pardis says. “That’s when the faculty offers started coming in.” Though she finished her MD somewhere in this period, it was not until this point that her mission finally became clear: Becoming a clinical doctor didn’t make sense; she was going to build a research career focused on her use of computational genetics to combat ancient diseases. Pardis took a professorship at Harvard, finally ready to commit to a single focus in her working life.

What struck me about Pardis’s story is how remarkably late it was in her training before she identified the mission that now defines her career. This lateness is best represented by her decision to still attend—and finish!—medical school even though she was working on PhD research that was starting to attract notice. These are not the actions of someone who is certain of her destiny from day one. This certainty didn’t come until later, around the time of her Nature publication, when Pardis had finally developed her computational genetics ideas to the point where their usefulness and novelty were obvious.

To use my terminology, this long period of training, starting with her undergraduate biology classes and continuing through her PhD and then postdoctoral work at the Broad Institute, was when she was building up her stores of career capital. When she took a professorship at Harvard, she was finally ready to cash in this capital to obtain the mission-driven career she enjoys today.

Rule #4 is entitled “Think Small, Act Big.” It’s in this understanding of career capital and its role in mission that we get our explanation for this title. Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of “small” thinking, requiring you to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once you get to the cutting edge, however, and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a “big” action.

Pardis Sabeti thought small by focusing patiently for years on a narrow niche (the genetics of diseases in Africa), but then acting big once she acquired enough capital to identify a mission (using computational genetics to help understand and fight ancient diseases). Sarah and Jane, by contrast, reversed this order. They started by thinking big, looking for a world-changing mission, but without capital they could only match this big thinking with small, ineffectual acts. The art of mission, we can conclude, asks us to suppress the most grandiose of our work instincts and instead adopt the patience—the style of patience observed with Pardis Sabeti—required to get this ordering correct.