Over two years ago, I had a conversation with a professor at USC — Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering (AME) Professor Matt Gilpin — which totally changed the way I view PhDs and the mechanics of how a lot of hard things come together in life in general.
To paraphrase, he essentially said the following:
"A PhD only takes two weeks to complete – It really only takes about two weeks to do your PhD Experiments (or run your simulations)... BUT it takes five years to figure out how to get the simulations right"
He essentially mentioned how PhDs (in general) progress exponentially — you usually are down in the weeds for the first year or even few years, often making very little progress.
Throughout that phase in particular — and often throughout the PhD — you're figuring out what works and what doesn't. You often try out research paths that don't work out and that's fine.
But then near the end, you double down on what's working. You figure out which experiments worked successfully and you replicate them. You've debugged your code and it suddenly goes from not working at all to running perfectly. You also figure out what parts of your research are scientifically valuable and defensible.
Ironically, I ended up dropping out of my own PhD over a year later both due to factors largely out of my control and much better alternate career opportunities elsewhere, but I think that the lesson here is very powerful and applies to many things worth achieving in life.
The area near USC's Ronald Tutor Campus Center where Dr. Gilpin and I had the conversation in May 2024
Some Examples
One of my favorite examples – as I navigate the stress and uncertainty of my own career – is Steve Martin's career trajectory as a comedian.
Near the beginning of his book, "Born Standing Up," Martin famously quipped:
"I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning [and largely failing], four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success."
Essentially, he underwent the exact same process that Dr. Gilpin mentioned above.
Similar to the PhD student "figuring it out for 5 years" before becoming a massive success, Martin did the same, just in a different domain.
Both had that phase where little or nothing was paying off — for years on end — before seemingly becoming "overnight successes."
In my own life, while I might not finish my PhD, I saw a similar exponential shift when it came to becoming an attractive job applicant and landing interviews recently.
After not having a single job interview for the first 3-1/2 (nearly 4) years of my Masters/PhD, I landed a Blue Origin GNC (Guidance/Nav/Controls) Intern Interview (and Offer) in July 2025.
I had been spending YEARS trying to figure out how to market myself for high-paying jobs in the space industry and it all came together last year — I'd figured out how to sell myself to hiring managers, what to say in coverletters, interviews, how to prepare technically, and so on.
This is also on top of the fact that my PhD research had switched 3 times in 3 years - which both delayed me making any real progress (which gave me nothing to help myself stand out in resume screens or interviews), and ultimately left me stuck in a relatively unemployable PhD topic (spacecraft contamination).
And once I interned at Blue, the floodgates opened, metaphorically, since I've subsequently gone on to interview with 15+ different companies for GNC Roles after getting virtually no interviews during the "figuring it out phase" for the previous 4 years.
(although, if I knew what I know now, this phase would be a lot shorter if I did it again…)
The same probably applies to becoming a successful entrepreneur and starting businesses.
In his January 2025 talk at USC, Sam Freeman mentioned that in business, "it might take 4 years before things take off in the 5th year" for example.
With FanFix (also extensively covered in previous articles here), they had absolutely zero traction, zero revenue for over 8 months – they tried, and repeatedly failed, at making it work a bunch of different ways – before eventually breaking through and making over $17,000 in month 9, then doubling their revenue approximately every month thereafter.
Same with content – Mr Beast posted for years and made thousands of videos before finally taking off. Many other successful creators who have broken through went through the same (Alan Chikin Chow, RDC World, Steven He, etc.).
An amateur standup comic — even if they just want to be funny — might spend several months getting zero or few laughs (like me when I first started at USC), but then exponentially and "suddenly" get better over time after they figure things out. Everything "magically" comes together.
The same probably applies to dating/relationships/getting married — something people my age think a lot about. At first, you might have a lot of failures and mishaps in dating, but then over time, your progress compounds and suddenly one day you meet your future life partner (and are ready to meet them) and everything lines up perfectly.
Or when it comes to full ride scholarships and college admissions, you spend years working your tail off, then one day you suddenly land full ride scholarships to UCLA and USC – seemingly a sudden step-change, but something years in the making.
Conclusion
In his now universally famous book "Atomic Habits," author James Clear details a similar but slightly different phenomenon called "The Plateau of Latent Potential."
While his framework applies to more simple habits (such as "losing weight", "gaining muscle" etc.) which have a more straightforward solution (even if they have similarly exponential progress), the "Gilpin Rule" moreso applies to areas such as careers, life, and business since it captures more of the complexities and nuances required to be successful in real life, complicated endeavors.
Both frameworks have invisible compounding and a "valley of disappointment" which results in early results lagging behind early inputs and efforts, with later delayed breakthroughs and explosive exponential growth (and the "illusion of overnight success" that accompanies it).
But my argument is that where the Gilpin Rule differs is that it isn't just about consistency, it's also about the fact that "figuring it out" and failure going down the wrong direction is just a part of the process and is completely normal in real-life, more complex systems.
Complex systems often yield exponential rather than linear returns relative to the amount of effort input (and involve a lot of errors and failure in the process) — as seen in "Gilpin's rule" here.
In the venture capital world, the "Hockey-Stick Growth" concept is very similar – many founders go through a prolonged period of "figuring it out" before a sudden success when creating a startup.
Of course, over 90% of startups fail — so the "figuring it out phase" won't lead to a guaranteed outcome, and there's where the "push vs pivot" concept comes in.
Appendix: When To "Push Through vs. Pivot"
The only caveat that I'll leave off with, is that the next natural question is: "How do you know when it's simply time to push or to pivot?" or better said, "When do you know if you're working on something worth working hard on which will ultimately have that exponential hockey stick growth, versus how do you know when your efforts won't see that payoff?"
That's a great question for a future article — many of my past ones, including Harry Gestetner's PMF and business startup frameworks, and Steven He's optimization process all sort of answer the questions of "when do you know you're onto something (versus not)" (and, also, the additional question of "when you are onto something, how do you speed up that learning curve / rate of success," as with Steven's Optimization framework), but it'll definitely be worth a deeper dive on its own in the future.
There's a YouTube personality and business-person called Alex Hormozi who goes into this "when to Push vs Pivot" decision in more detail. His videos and articles on the topic are definitely a good place to start.