Ii I'm Casey, I'm a professor. And if you are in academia,
particularly if you're a graduate student, you might spend a lot of time thinking about failure.
As academics we do a lot of things that seemingly result in success or failure:
submitting a paper for publication, submitting a grant proposal,
passing a milestone like preliminary or qualifying exams, or a dissertation proposal or defense,
looking for an academic job or really any kind of job. I mean it's not like this is unique to
academia, right, like everyone is constantly doing things that might result in success or failure.
Whether it's, you know, trying out a new recipe or trying to teach your dog a trick.
But I think for academics in particular the way that we measure success is based on metrics like
how many papers have you published and how many dollars in funding have you brought in. It can
be really easy to constantly focus on the failures even when you have successes. Especially when the
hit rate is low, right. And especially because for things like grant funding where there is
so little money and so many people trying for it, failing doesn't even mean that your work
was bad. You could put in so much effort and even have something really amazing in the end
but the bar can just be so high because of the competition.
And when it comes to publications there's so much randomness in the review process that even getting
a paper rejected doesn't even necessarily mean that it was a bad paper at all. So how do we not
focus on the failure. I wish I could give you a good answer to this some magic technique
that would solve all of your problems and make you look at the world in a different way.
I can't really do that. But let me see if I can give a few pieces of advice that help me in how
to think about this. One is that failures can very often turn into successes later. One rejection for
a paper doesn't mean that that paper is not going to get published. It just means that you need to
try again. I would say that these days it's pretty common for something that I submit to be rejected
at least once. Sometimes I think these rejections are justified and sometimes I definitely don't.
Again there's a lot of randomness in the review process. I have a little bit about this in my
video about how peer review works, it might make you feel better about the whole thing.
so the important lesson here is to not give up,
right. I mean sometimes obviously there are things that are one shots. If you don't get that
particular internship that particular summer which might be the last chance that you could do it,
but there will be other opportunities. Of course it is perfectly fine to be disappointed. We're
all disappointed all of the time about a lot of stuff. But when there are other opportunities,
when there's a possibility that that failure can turn into a success,
if you don't try it will definitely always remain a failure. Yay for revise and resubmit!
Even if you're submitting it to a different venue. Another thing about failures is that we can learn
from them, right? Often there is a very helpful information in those rejections. Here's a weakness
in your CV, here's something that could have been explained better in that paper, here's
a way that you should frame your work for grant proposals. The more you fail the more you learn
which means that you might end up having a higher proportion of success later. So definitely try
to learn from failures. You know, again, there's some randomness so sometimes there's
not always something to learn but often there is. Okay something else that's really important
about failures is that it can seem like you are failing more than everyone else.
You definitely have so many more failures than successes. Do you feel like that? Sometimes I
feel like that. But one of the reasons for that is that we don't often see people's failures
right? We don't tend to announce on social media when we've had papers rejected. Some people do,
I do sometimes for this exact reason. It's not the thing that you're putting on your annual
performance report. So because we often see people talking about their successes
we get this inflated sense of how much success people have relative to failure. Whereas we
don't know often how many times that paper was rejected before it was published, we don't know
how many grants that faculty member has submitted and had rejections before getting this one
funded grant. I can tell you I have had a lot of unsuccessful grant proposals.
And it's totally reasonable that people don't want to talk about this right? It's psychological, we
don't want everyone to think that we're failures. Though I will say that occasionally talking about
academic failure can help normalize it for this exact reason. And of course when we're looking at
someone's CV it just has a list of publications. It's not like it has a list of rejected papers.
Unless you have a CV of failures. There was a professor a few years ago whose
CV of failures went slightly viral, things like rejected papers and rejected grants.
Also my collaborator Jessica Vitak has her CV of failures on her website, everything from
PhD programs that she wasn't admitted to to rejected papers and grants and also the school
play that she did not get the part in. I have had many many many of my own failures. In fact the
first time that I applied to PhD programs I was rejected from every single one of them, including
the Phd program that eventually accepted me years later, and the PhD program from a place that years
later offered me a job. I have gotten many paper rejections, I have gotten many grant rejections,
there are PhD students who I made offers to to come work with me as their advisor
who turned me down. A number of those actually. And like Jessica I have one that haunts me. In
the fourth grade I really deserved the solo in show choir and they gave it to a third grader.
I also used to write a lot of science fiction and fantasy short fiction. You think you think
the National Science Foundation has low acceptance rates? The big short fiction
venues like Asimov's and Fantasy and Science Fiction have like one percent acceptance rates.
I have so many rejection letters for my writing. But again we don't talk about this as much right.
The point is everyone is experiencing failure all the time. Think about whoever you think is like
the luminary in your field, like the person that you want to be when you grow up.
I guarantee you that person is getting papers rejected. Guaranteed. If you
are somehow some magical unicorn that never gets rejections or has failures in academia,
then like I want to know what your secret is but you're definitely a unicorn. And often it
actually feels like you get more rejection as you get farther in your career because probably
you're trying more right? Like my first few years as faculty I had way more paper rejections than I
did during my entire PhD but that's because I was submitting a lot more things. So in some
everybody's failing all the time, you're not alone, it's just how the world is. And you know
I'm using the word failure a lot but sometimes it doesn't even need to be framed as failure. Is a
paper rejection with good comments on it that will make the paper better actually a failure? Or is it
really a success because now you can revise the paper and when it's eventually published it will
be a better paper than if it had been published before those revisions? And sometimes our failures
lead to better outcomes than we expect. There are grant proposals that I had rejected in my
first couple of years of faculty life that now I'm a little relieved about because I'm not sure that
that would have been the work i wanted to do. Or jobs that i was rejected from. If I'd been there
instead I wouldn't be in the awesome place that I'm in now. I'm not trying to make some
everything happens for a reason kind of argument but sometimes we don't know where our failures
might lead to and maybe it's an even better outcome. So what do you do when you feel like
something has been a failure? I'd certainly like to say pick yourself up and try again. And often
that is exactly what you should do. And sometimes the answer is move on and think about what
the next success might be. Also when you're feeling a particularly heartbreaking rejection
it can be good to remind yourself of some of your most heartening successes. The next time you have
a big success, a paper that you are super excited about being accepted, that internship that you've
been dreaming of that you actually got, take a minute to write how you feel in that moment.
are you feeling like your career is going to be awesome? Are you feeling like whatever you do next
is going to be your best thing? Do you feel like this paper that you're getting at in the world
is going to change the world? Remember that feeling so that the next time you're feeling bad
about something else you can remind yourself what a success feels like and that you're gonna have
that feeling again. But another thing is celebrate the small successes! We are often thinking about
big things right? The paper, the grant, the job, but there are little successes that you have
every day. I've been talking recently to some first-year phd students about
how stressful it can feel that you're already behind, kind of even when you get there, and
oh no am I supposed to have a paper published in my first year? And my answer is usually no, I mean
I guess if you can that's great but like my metric of success for a first year PhD student is like,
you survive, nice job! You learn how to be a PhD student, you figure out how to juggle classes and
research and teaching assistant duties and just this huge change in your life. Surviving,
thumbs up, that is a success in many cases. But also so many small successes like, was the
reading reflection that you submitted for this class this week like real insightful, like did
like you really hit something there that made you feel like you really understood
something? Did you make a comment in a class where everyone was like yeah
totally. Did you finish your first paper? Who cares if it's accepted or not, you wrote a paper!
Big deal, seriously! We can't let ourselves get sucked into just the things that we think
are external metrics decide what success means for you.
If you go back to my video with advice for new PhD students one of the big ones was don't
compare yourself to other people. Your metrics of success should be yours everyone's situation
is so different. And if there's that one person that's like publishing ten papers a year sure
that's great for them and then next year if they publish eight that becomes a failure. But for you
if you publish that one amazing paper even though it takes you a couple of years that
could really be success. And also know that if you feel like you're feeling a lot of failure now
that's just now. I often mention to people that I was a late bloomer as a PhD student. I didn't
have a first author paper until my fourth year. I was just at a different pace than some people
,my situation was different, my research was different, and everything has worked out really
well. So find what success means for you and I promise it's something for everyone and try to
find your support system too. Because the other thing is when you get that rejection
you're gonna feel disappointed, make sure you don't like tweet about it.
Get a rejection buddy, someone that you can vent to because talking about rejection openly is fine,
complaining about it, that does not tend to go as well. But it can be really nice to just get
it out with someone and then that person can also be your celebration buddy. So you can...
your successes together without being too obnoxious for everyone else.
All right, I hope that was helpful in terms of how to think about this
tricky topic of academic failure. If you have tips for other people and how to deal with this
please leave them in the comments below. I'm sure that everyone could learn from each other.
All right and that's all I've got for you today, I've got to go
work on a grant proposal that is probably going to be rejected so. I'm Casey, thanks for watching.