It jives with what I've observed the grad students I've known going through. I think it's important to frame oneself as a mental athlete. Olympic athletes don'

It jives with what I've observed the grad students I've known going through. I think it's important to frame oneself as a mental athlete. Olympic athletes don't exert themselves for 20 hours and then get 4 hours sleep and expect any kind of peak performance. You need sleep, you need a mix of focused effort, and unfocused consolidation / inspiration time, etc. Programmers and students have a tendency to ignore lessons about training and peak performance that are well understood by those in physical sports. This course changed my life: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn