A while ago, I was re-reading (ok, I confess, listening during my daily walks) the classic scientific masterpiece The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson.
It’s a good book. Seriously. Worth a read. Twice.
And before we even go to today’s sermon, I’ll just once again use this opportunity to affirm my love for good self-help books! It’s just that sometimes academics, in particular, are just…honestly bad at reading them, essentially self-sabotaging themselves through over-intellectualising everything.
One thought from the book I jotted down after the walk goes something like this: if you think you must be among the very top or you suck, you’re saying 95% of all people suck.
Stop with that for a sec. Academia just loves that kind of “win big or go home” thinking. That’s the external evaluation that we’re all being subjected to. But the shocking thing is that many then believe that and also turn their internal scorecard to align with that thinking.
And that’s a road to persistent anxiety. You keep chasing that super-hard-to-hit goal forever… and while doing so, just every day reinforcing the same unconscious reality over and over: “I’m not that yet.”
Rewiring your brains to “I’m not enough.” Not enough until that grant. Until more papers. And you know what’s after more papers? It’s more papers. More grants.
Every morning, you start the same cycle to become “good enough” an academic.
Nobody Wrote Down the Mold
Want to know why the goalposts keep moving?
There is no job description for “good academic.”
There never was! Go ask ten professors in your faculty what that mythical “excellence” looks like. You’ll get ten different answers. All of them think they’re right. Their mold is the right one. Of course it is! You can hear it in the confident tone, the “this is the way” attitude.
Then look at how much they contradict. Because they will.
And then you. What does that smart, high-performing brain of yours do when the target is undefined?
It targets the loudest option, and in today’s world the loudest option is the most celebrated one. Social media, attention, press releases, they’re all going to… well, you know what they’re going to: The NSF and ERC grants. Nature and Science. The best paper awards! The big bangs of the world.
It’s logical of course. All those are visible, countable, and rankable. People like specificity and big numbers. Numbers are easy to track.
Yet there’s SO much more to academia than celebrating and obsessing over numbers. So let’s have a look at the different shoes… and think if some of these fit you!
Look Around Your Own Department
Ok not really, but in your head! Or I don’t know, you can walk too if you want. Anyway. Walk the corridor.
Peek inside the rooms you’ve seen a hundred times. I’ll make a bet. You’ll find a few of these:
- The machine. Output-obsessed. Papers keep magically appearing, month after month. Lives for the “game” of it. 3-4 papers going on at any given point in time.
- The teacher. Publishes maybe one thing every 3 years. Runs courses that kill it, and as a result has quietly affected hundreds of lives of students (more than the machine above ever will…)
- The community builder. Runs the Christmas party, the summer school, the internal workshops.
- The politics guy. Knows how the faculty machine works and how to weasel one’s way into the international committees that actually matter and provide visibility (which equals to institutional prestige.)
- The builder. Built the tool that everyone uses. Other people’s careers literally run on top of that. Sucks at research. But builds.
- The weirdo. Does random stuff. Still somehow critically important to the whole operation. Nobody can quite point out why, but..yeah, keeps being there year after year, and is still very much necessary.
Every one of these people exists. I’d be surprised if you don’t recognise a few of these. Not one of them is doing the same job as the others. But somehow they’re all academics.
There’s no mold. And as the optimist I am, I really think that’s the good news.
I wrote before about how nobody gets to choose your lane and on why chasing papers as the goal quietly wrecks the work. I feel like this is almost the same idea, just applied to your identity.
There are so many ways forward.
Earning Your Keep
I can hear some of you already going like “Great, delusional Simo pretends anything counts, but look at my situation!“
No. That’s not the point at all. Not everything is OK. That mythical “academic freedom”, to the degree it still exists (it does, by the way), was never a permission to get paid by taxpayers forever to just have fun and/or do nothing. That’d be called “fraud”. Someone out there works a hard job, pays their taxes, and a slice of it goes to us.
We owe something in return.
So yes, you have to provide value. Your institution gets to define what that value is, and how much. How much of “shoveling” to meet the quota, that’s for them to design with you. That constitutes the floor.
Anything above the floor? That’s the freedom part.
Rise above the floor with good old focused work, and the rest is for you to roam and explore.
Most academics never learn they have this design task ahead of them. They just grind, never stopping really to find out “what’s my floor”, as dictated by common understanding between the institution and you.
No wonder the space above floor feels miserable, as they don’t even see the space.
So What Should go Above the Floor?
Okay, again, I cannot know what your floor is. Chances are not even you know it now (hint: perhaps find out?)
But it still makes sense to design the space above it. And since nobody really is going to define it for you, it’s better to take some time to think about it yourself.
- Which parts of your job would you still do if nobody counted it? Numbers are trackable and are quite often used to please external eyes. What would you do if you got to do it during paid working hours, but they are not number-driven?
- What would be lost if you vanished tomorrow? Don’t think of things like who would take over your TA duties. What non-tangible aspect of your lab would be missed — what are you naturally good at that others would miss?
- Which colleague do you envy for their life? Ohh, very different from envying their track record. Their life. How is their space above the floor organized? Worth noticing, even if not emulating, of course.
Again, this is how you build self-awareness. The one thing I keep going back to with almost everything. Fix the floor, then design above it. Or you risk ending up on the treadmill.
You’re Already (Conditionally) Accepted
Statistical facts first: Only a tiny slice of academics win the highest prices. It’s not like there’s an ERC or NSF grant for everyone.
There just isn’t.
You’re enough when you’re doing honest, useful work with the resources you were trusted with.
Be happy about them.
You’re enough when you clear the floor and then build something on top of it that’s recognisably yours. Boldly yours.
You’re enough when you can look at your own week and genuinely see 15 wins (yes, mandatory promo of my own Quick Start Guide, which I have happily migrated to Whop!)
That’s it.
And this isn’t some participation trophy for people who “didn’t make it” either. It’s just that those perpetually after the top 1% forever are the ones missing out!
Neither is this a call for less ambition. Of course, you should do your best to pursue the big wins. Just recognise the floor, and design the space above it to your liking.
You might just discover how much fun the freedom really is.