Flying Close to the Sun... and Why it Can Be Exhausting!

I'm excited to release my first Hacking Academia video and podcast for 2024, "Flying Close to the Sun... and Why it Can Be Exhausting!".

The basic premise is that if you're pushing hard in your career, you're going to inevitably land some opportunities and responsibilities that stretch or are even outside your capability and capacity... cue a bunch of on-the-job learning and hard-won experience.

There's nothing wrong with this - but the learning-and-adapting-to-the-new thing can be an exhausting process, so the key is to be deliberative about how and when you go for something a little beyond your current limits, and balance it with bread-and-butter activity that you can do with your eyes closed, so to speak.

As well as re-evaluate where you're pushing when one of those things does indeed come through (or conversely, is unsuccessful). Uncertainty and long lead times is the enemy in career planning in fields like academia, so when you know an outcome, you should replan...

Due to time commitments this year, I'm going to experiment with more off-the-cuff, completely ad libbed videos this year and see how we go, and work with the backlog of annotation, chapter headings etc... in batches later on.