Doctoral success is not and never was merely a function of hard work and good grades. We can prove this using logic. The real guarantor of student success is autonomy: The article by Skakni (2018) introduces the reader a notion called “biased originality” (p. 936). Biased originality is an instance of the autonomous class of doctoral student behaviors (Skakni, 2018). This paper consists of two parts: deductive analysis and inductive analysis. Therefore, this paper has two goals: To ascertain the essential factors leading to doctoral success—the reader is already aware of the thesis naming autonomy as the chief factor—but the second goal is to juxtapose these two competing epistemological approaches to the acquisition of knowledge: deduction versus induction; positivism versus constructivism; empirical versus experiential; quantitative versus qualitative, etc. We ultimately arrive at the following thesis: The successful doctoral scholar is quintessentially an autonomous, self-motivated agentive personality who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals (Skakni, 2018).