what is the secret to your academic success?

Recently I applied for a work-from-home customer service job. i haven't heard anything, and I don't honestly expect to, but I don't mind much. I need to start applying some time, and starting slow before I really need a job can't be a bad idea.

One of the last questions in the online application portal asked the secret to [my] academic success. I said it was that I had not yet quit. I am not startlingly brilliant. I am not passionate (and I do cringe at the word) about philosophy. But I do have two master's degrees and I am about twenty pages away from a complete doctoral dissertation on an interesting and under-explored topic and the only reason is that I have not yet given up.

This is true. I did not lie then and repeating the gist of what I wrote is no lie now.

Still, rereading philosopher Alice Koller's response to a significantly similar question rang too true for comfort:

Ed's question returns to me again: "What sustained you during all those years of getting the degree?" When I leave Nantucket, I may know. Now I can only say: blind pride, together with a constant and ignorant heedlessness of the consequences of my acts and the passage of time. Even saying I ignored them assumes that I knew what the consequences were but was tossing them aside. But I didn't know and I still don't. 

Never once did I ever think of myself defending my dissertation. Never did I imagine myself in a job post-graduation. I assumed that by the time I finished my degree (any of them), I'd have figured things out, learned what it is I am meant to do. I assumed that once I hit or passed thirty years of age, I'd be sufficiently at home in myself to know what it is I want to do. None of these things have turned out to be true. And I will have to defend in the next few months without having learned what the next step is. By now I can acknowledge, even if I can't accept, that this is simply the case, that I will step out into darkness, and that there is no escape from this.