Most of us know the closing lines of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” The traveler takes the road “less traveled by,” and “that has made all the difference.” We quote it at graduations and print it on posters. Then, given the choice, most of us take the path of least resistance.
That isn’t laziness. It’s human. The easy road is paved and well lit, and it’s crowded, so we never feel alone on it. The harder road is narrow and steep, and you often can’t see where it ends. This article is about that second road, about the people who make us walk it, and about why so many of us turn away from it.
Nine Drafts
My first course in the Ph.D. program was epistemology, the branch of philosophy that asks how we know what we claim to know. Two faculty members taught it. One of them, Dr. Margo Okazawa-Rey, would later become my dissertation Chair, and I invited the other onto my committee. Margo, who holds a doctorate in education from Harvard, is known around the world for research and activism that examine the connections between militarism and the global economy, the struggles of communities of color in the United States and abroad, and the security of women worldwide. She doesn’t settle for easy answers, from the world or from her students.
We were assigned a paper. I wrote it and turned it in, and it came back. I rewrote it, and it came back again. That happened about nine times. Each time it was returned, I had to look again at what I had written and ask whether it was really my best thinking or just my first.
It was exhausting, and some days it felt personal. But she wasn’t punishing me. She would not accept less from me than I was capable of, and she was willing to wait until I saw it too.
Not Close Enough to the Data
When it came time to choose a dissertation Chair, I asked Margo. I could have chosen someone who would let me slide, and there are always such people. I didn’t want that. I knew she would hold my feet to the fire, and she did. I have to admit that I put her through the paces; she had to continually reign me in as I wandered all about different fields and theories.
I had finished my coursework and spent twelve months on research and analysis. I presented my findings to three members of my committee. There were many questions and a lot of feedback. When the meeting ended, Margo asked to see me privately.
She told me I was not close enough to my data, and that I needed to go back and start the analysis over.
Twelve months of work. I went home with that sentence in my head.
Then I spent the next six months with my data, the old-fashioned way. I wrote index cards and color-coded them. I sorted them, coded them, and sorted them again, until the patterns came up out of the material instead of being pressed onto it. When I presented the new analysis to the committee, they applauded. I was told I could begin writing my dissertation.
I’m not telling this story because the applause mattered. It mattered that by the end I knew my data. I hadn’t just processed it. I had lived inside it. That’s a different thing, and I would never have found out how different if she had let me slide.
Getting Versus Becoming
At the start of that journey, I heard one phrase over and over: We are not here to get a Ph.D. We are here to become a Ph.D.
It sounds like wordplay. It isn’t. When I taught master’s-level students at the university, I tried to pass it on. You are not here to get an MBA, I told them. You are here to become a master of business administration.
“Getting” treats the degree, the promotion, or the credential as an object to pick up at the end of a line. The goal is to finish the line. Every shortcut is a gain, and every rewrite is a loss.
“Becoming” treats the goal as a change in who you are. Then the rewrites aren’t losses. They are where the change actually happens. The ninth draft isn’t a penalty for the first eight. It’s what the first eight were for.
This mindset changes more than the outcome. It changes how you go through the process. You stop asking “What’s the least I need to do?” and start asking “What is this asking of me?”
That second question is the road less traveled. Few people take it, because it is hard work. It’s tiring and full of setbacks. If you go deeply enough into it, it becomes a liminal experience: a threshold where you are no longer who you were and not yet who you will be. Anthropologist Victor Turner called this state being “betwixt and between.”
What is on the other side of what we dare to become? That question is what makes us hesitate.
Why We Hesitate: A Social Constructionist View
I have come to understand these hesitations, anxieties, and fears through the lens of social constructionism.
In plain terms, social constructionism holds that the meanings we live by aren’t handed to us ready-made. We build them together. Sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann made the case in The Social Construction of Reality (1966). Psychologist Kenneth Gergen and colleagues at the Taos Institute carried it further. What counts as “success,” “smart,” “good enough,” or even “who I am” is shaped by the language, relationships, and communities we belong to. We absorb those meanings so early and so completely that they feel like simple facts.
This view explains three things about the easy road.
First, the easy road is a story we have been told. Our culture largely treats education as a transaction: pay tuition, earn credits, collect the credential. If that’s the shared story, a professor who returns your paper nine times looks like an obstacle, not a gift. The shortcut doesn’t feel like a shortcut. It feels normal.
Second, the self is built with others, so changing it puts relationships at risk. If who I am is woven out of my relationships and the stories told about me, then becoming someone new means pulling at those threads. A high school guidance counselor once told me to get used to the idea of working on a factory line. That was a story about me, and it had weight. Choosing the harder road meant refusing that story, and refusing a story others have written for you is uncomfortable. People may not recognize the new you, and you may not recognize yourself yet.
Third, the threshold is frightening because the old meanings no longer hold and the new ones haven’t formed. In the liminal space, nothing from the old story quite fits. Stepping back onto the familiar road is a way to make that discomfort stop.
There is a quiet irony in Frost’s poem that fits here. Read it closely and the traveler admits the two roads were worn “really about the same.” The difference he claims is a meaning he builds afterward, in the telling. That is social constructionism in one poem. The road less traveled isn’t only a matter of which path you choose. It’s what you are willing to let the path make of you.
A Partner on the Road
Looking back, I don’t think I could have walked that road alone. I needed someone like Margo, someone who would not accept my first draft as my best, and who cared more about who I was becoming than about whether I liked her that semester. That is why, when I gave my commencement speech, I shared that “becoming a PhD takes a village.”
That is rare, and it is a gift. Most of us are surrounded by people who, out of kindness, help us take the easy way. A partner who holds your feet to the fire is offering something harder and better: the chance to find out what you are actually capable of.
So here is the question I’ll leave with you. Where in your life are you trying to get something when you could be becoming something? And who is the person, or who could it be, willing to send your work back one more time?
I’d like to hear your story in the comments.
