Why being smart isn’t enough to complete a PhD

“Say, you have taken that ethics course at the graduate school, right? Otherwise you can’t get your PhD,” says your colleague.

Your neighbor approaches it differently: “I really admire you for being so smart, all that reading, all that studying. I could never do that. Your parents must be so proud of you.”

When people talk about your PhD, it’s almost always about how smart you need to be. About doing research, reading difficult books, analyzing data, developing theories, mastering methodology. About science and brilliant ideas. As if intelligence is the key to a successful dissertation.

But that’s exactly where it goes wrong.

A PhD isn’t about being smart — it’s about the process

A PhD tests something very different from your IQ. It’s about perseverance, self-leadership, and the ability to cope with uncertainty and setbacks. It requires you to learn how to handle criticism. It’s about how you organize yourself, how you keep going when you get stuck or lose sight of the bigger picture. That’s where the real challenge lies.

Think about that moment when you’ve been wrestling with a paragraph for hours and feel like it’s leading nowhere. Or after months of work, you get a scathing peer review. Or when you’ve been putting off writing for weeks because it just feels too overwhelming. How you deal with those moments — that determines whether you will successfully complete your PhD, not how smart you are.

What it’s really about

A PhD is — much more than an academic journey — a period of personal growth. It demands self-knowledge. It asks you to take charge of your own process. A PhD isn’t about the content, but about how you shape the process.

How do you plan a realistic deadline? How do you stay focused while juggling a thousand other tasks? How do you prevent yourself from drowning in literature? What do you do when you get stuck in an analysis or suffer from writer’s block? How do you ensure you get the right feedback from the right people?

Being smart might help you understand your topic. But without skills like planning, prioritizing, writing, rewriting, managing your energy, and adjusting course, it will be a long and difficult road.

The process determines the success

You can be brilliant in your field — but without a good process, you’ll never complete that PhD successfully. If your process is in order, the content will follow naturally.

That’s also why so many PhD candidates struggle, despite being “smart enough.” Because no one ever taught them how to manage the process. Universities largely leave that part out of their supervision. In fact, many PhD candidates feel completely alone in this. That’s why I wrote What they don’t tell you about your PhD a long time ago — because this part of doing a PhD is rarely spoken about openly.

How can you steer the process?

The good news: you can learn process awareness. There are tools, strategies, and structures that help you get a grip. The best starting point? Our Travel Guide to your PhD. This guide helps you build your process step by step, with practical advice and reflections — so that you not only complete your PhD, but do so in a way that fits you.

In summary

Being smart is great, but it’s not enough. It’s your ability to steer the process, to deal with setbacks, and to keep yourself going that determines whether you complete your PhD. Focus on that — and the content will take care of itself.