If you don't have a PhD: yes, this statement is accurate. A little sympathy wouldn't hurt, you know.If you're currently doing a PhD: your brain is probably already pregnant. I feel you. Every day it gets a little harder to drag your ailing body out of bed. Dealing with the occasional morning sickness (unrelated to last night's drinking). The prospect of the dreaded third trimester looming (i.e., writing the book and numerous postdoc proposals). Maybe it's not too late to consider a late-term abortion?If you have a PhD: congratulations! You won… Erm… Well what did you win? I guess you can proudly call yourself a doctor. However, don't bother getting up when someone yells out for a doctor on a plane. They will not be as impressed with the highest academic degree as one might expect. Now skip past the rest of this preface section, read this book from cover to cover, and only afterwards return here to read the rest. No cheating! You will be quizzed! Who am I kidding? You're probably not actually going to bother with the rest of this book. Just like if I would be presenting you my newborn, you're going to congratulate me and disappear as soon as you get a whiff of its insides… How about trying to imagine reading this book from cover to cover? It's over 200 pages of scientific and peer-reviewed work. That's a lot, right? Now imaging having to write such a behemoth. Each chapter/paper needs a problem statement, relevant research questions, a methodology to find answers to those questions, a literature review of the state-of-the-art on the subject and, most importantly, a description of actual contributions to that state-of-the-art. Each chapter/section/paragraph/sentence/word carefully written, criticized by peers, rewritten, criticized by peers, rewritten again, criticized by peers, etc. until everyone involved starts to involuntarily cringe at the mere thought of it. But you can't just start writing. A paper is merely a report of research ii that you would've already done by then. The research consists of formulating interesting, relevant and unsolved problems, which you subsequently must tackle head-onfully aware of the fact that it had probably already crossed the minds of other researchers, who had likely discarded the idea because they considered it an insurmountable problem that only fools would waste their time on.And yet again, you cannot just start formulating interesting, relevant and unsolved problems without being an expert on a certain subject. How do you become an expert? Reading, more reading, even more reading and -you've guessed itsome more reading (my favorite pastime!). Luckily, you can stop when you've learned enough buzzwords to fool other researchers into thinking that you know what you're talking about. Fake it till you make it! After all, we're living in the Trump-era… "I know words, I have the best words" Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States of America But before you can start reading up on a certain subject, you need to choose a suitable subject.Something that interests you in ...