A PhD dropout's words!

I dropped out of PhD thrice! And I am still thinking of joining for a Ph.D. in some institute again, but after a decade.

A considerable number of Ph.D. supervisors say that the P-H-D is a test of patience, hard work, and dedication. However, my opinion differs. For me, P-H-D is passion, humility, and detachment. Consider a child passionate for learning a musical instrument. For the child, learning that instrument isn't at all about patience, hard work, and dedication! He fails several times to play the way he has imagined but doesn't think of it as a failure. He thinks about it as a process of learning. He doesn't think that he needs patience. He doesn't look at the efforts required to learn as efforts at all! He just puts in his time and feels happy about learning something new! He never considers it as hard work.  He indeed is dedicated/determined to learn, but he doesn't put in all the time for learning the instrument only. He has a balanced life. He has a regular school schedule, homework, playing, and learning a musical instrument is just a small part of his schedule, which he is happy about. Failure doesn't affect him because of his detached nature as well. Detachment prevents him from getting frustrated in the learning process. A passionate person would put in quality time, that's dedication. A passionate person doesn't think about patience but indirectly has it already.

A humble person is open to learning from every source available. He doesn't reject suggestions just because of his or his supervisor's bias toward someone or something. A detached person puts in quality time for the task at hand and is detached from the results. Even a million failures don't affect, and the person doesn't have to think of dedication or his supervisor pointing at lack of dedication, as he himself doesn't lose the motivation to pursue his work.

Patience, hard work and dedication/determination are a by-product or rather a subset of passion, humility, and detachment. So, if your supervisor thinks that P-H-D is something different, he indeed has suffered a lot in his Ph.D. - sacrificed his personal life, been tortured by his supervisors, misguided and made to work prolonged hours, just to see if the candidate has patience, hardworking capability, and determination to do Ph.D. Just dump him/her! They'll try their best to get the passion out of you! Move over to a person and a place where people understand what passion is, and how enjoyable learning something new is!

Your Ph.D. isn't just about a subject, it is about learning a lot of things. And the industry is going to hire you because of your learning capabilities than your specific domain knowledge restricted to your Ph.D. research area. Than killing your time under a frustrated govt servant, living his life to get a pension after retirement, show off his class 1 job or a fancy tag-degree, move over to a happy humble person who can give more independence and learning opportunities! Leave the egoist! And if you are trapped with an egoist, the only way to get your Ph.D. is his way, not yours! You'll have to embrace slavery until you graduate! And with your Ph.D., as a bonus, you'll lose self-esteem and forever live like a hypocrite!