Recently, to me, there is no distinction between weekdays and weekends. I have been working 7 days a week in the lab for more than 3 weeks. It is ROUGH. Today, I came to school around 9AM and now, it is a little bit passed 9 PM. I just wrapped up my work. It is also not easy to utilize french fries for meals. Physically, I am tired. Mentally, I am still full of energy. All the hardship that I am doing right now is to protect my dream. (I kept telling myself using the words from “The pursuit of happiness”: ‘You got a dream; You gotta protect it.’ ) My short-term dream is to standout from too many Ph.D students in the States and graduate within 4 years. This is not what you say, like many others. This is what you do. Future is unforeseen. Everyone does not know when the current mission is going to be accomplished; yet many people do things steadily assuming the current pace will lead to the finish line on time. I prefer to do things with a sense of urgency. (to be continued, I need to catch a bus)

The following paragraphs are written at Midnight Sunday.

A little more than a day later, I had a real world experience of the unforeseen future: The work that I have done on Saturday gave me negative results earlier today after the final step of data collection and analysis. We had positive data of the same experiment. What we wanted from yesterday’s work is to reproduce what we have seen so that we can move on to a more sophisticated system. I have no choice but to work even harder to fine tune different parameters and figure out how to enhance the reproducibility.

My boss felt bad about the results after seeing me working hard everyday. He was worrying that I may get frustrated. I greatly appreciate his consideration. However, if a negative result frustrates me, there will be too much frustration in my life; If there were no pain of failures, I would have lost the sense of happiness. So I said to him: “it’s Ok. I’ll try another time tomorrow with better mouse strain and matching. By the end of next week, we will have another set of data to see if our hypothesis works.”

Seriously, it’s Ok to fail as long as I know I am working as hard as I can. I remember when a journalist asked Steve Jobs about the tanking stock price after product release, he responded calmly: “ we keep up with our top line (focusing on products), and the bottom line (stock price) will follow.”