Notes from someone still watering dust
By most conventional measures, I was not the person the system was designed to produce.
I was a first-generation university student, the first in my family to complete a PhD, and a migrant trying to navigate institutions that often seemed to come with an instruction manual everyone else had already read. The odds of me becoming an academic were not particularly favourable. At one point I took a seven-year career break. I finished my PhD without publications. Babies arrived. Health intervened. Life happened. Looking back, I sometimes wonder how many opportunities I never saw, and how many opportunities never saw me.
Which perhaps explains why I have become increasingly interested in potential, emergence, and what gets in the way.
The Matthew Effect tells us that advantage accumulates. Those who begin with access to networks, resources, confidence, and opportunity tend to acquire more of all four. Those who begin without them spend years learning rules that others absorbed almost unconsciously. Yet we often talk about excellence as though it emerges independently of circumstance. As though every seed were planted in the same soil. As though every child grew up with the same opportunities. As though every researcher began with the same networks, financial security, mentorship, confidence, and freedom to focus on their work.
They do not.
Some people are raised in environments where talent is actively cultivated. Books are plentiful. Education is expected. Networks already exist. Time and resources can be invested in growth. Others are raised in environments where the priority is simply keeping the lights on, putting food on the table, and making it through another week. Both can produce extraordinary people. But only one starts with a head start.
Perhaps this is why I have never been particularly interested in polished CVs. A CV tells me what has already emerged.
It tells me very little about what might.
Some of the most remarkable people I have met would not have looked impressive on paper at the beginning. Some had career breaks. Some changed careers entirely. Some arrived late. Some took the long road. Some were carrying burdens invisible to everyone around them. Potential rarely arrives fully formed. More often it arrives looking unfinished. Like a student asking questions nobody else thought to ask or an idea that is not yet a project. Or…like a researcher who does not yet know they are a researcher.
Like a handful of dust being sprayed with water every morning.
At the moment, I am growing lithops from seed. Every day I mist what appears to be a tray of dirt. To most people it looks faintly ridiculous. There is no visible reward. No guarantee of success. No proof that anything worthwhile is happening.
Yet I keep watering it.
Because growth is often invisible before it is obvious. The same is true of people. Of ideas, and of research capability. The same is true of communities. I sometimes think we spend too much time admiring the flowers and not enough time improving the soil. Too much time rewarding what has already emerged and not enough time recognising what might.
And perhaps that is why I keep finding myself drawn back to students, early career researchers, capability building, governance, mentorship, and systems.
Not because I am interested in excellence once it is visible. But because I am fascinated by the stage before that.
The awkward stage. The invisible stage. The stage where potential exists but evidence does not. The stage where many people walk past and see nothing.
The stage where somebody has to look beyond a wet CV and decide that possibility is worth investing in anyway.
After all, if nobody waters the dust, we will never know what might have grown.