> However, I would venture that being successful in any career --- be it research, business, politics, arts --- requires a certain amount of focus and neglect of your family and friends.A warning for the younger readers in our midst: this is NOT how most relationships work. You normally don't get to mismanage a relationship and then "make up for it" later. When you do, there are almost always lasting scars.
That said: this might be true for business and politics. But academics? LOL. Becoming a professor, even at a top university, is a pretty pathetic definition of "success". A professor is a mid-level manager position that pays about the same as an entry-level position at a top tech or finance firm. Most people involved in allocating budget / selecting projects understand that the work being managed is mostly not valuable; that's why they don't mind telling you that you need to pay your subordinates about what they'd make at McDonald's.
It's a first line management job where pay is not enough to "make up" for the lost years and the work almost always literally doesn't matter.
> But later, if you succeed, you can make it up to them and make it worth it for them as well.
This might be true in business and politics, and to some extent in arts, but it's not true in academia. And to the extent that it is true, it's enabled by pushing shit down the hill.
Which is why I'm a lapsed academic. I turned down my TT offers because I realized that I couldn't, in good conscience, build a career out of abusing junior labor. And universities put hard constraints on how you pay and manage PhD students, so avoiding at least financial abuse is mostly impossible.