What if the real problem isn’t academia, but where you’re focusing your attention?
Academia can be a great career choice!
I have zero evidence to believe otherwise. And I know it can. But of course you have to work for it.
Listen, it’s the same story over and over again. You know the duality already:
- There is no good if there’s no bad
- No light without darkness
- No hero without a villain
So, for you to be the hero in your story, you need those rejected papers, grants, annoying PIs, and lazy students (oh yeah, they do exist, unlike LinkedIn would have you believe).
In other words, yes, of course, it’s hard! It has to be hard to be any good! Everything great in life has to have a nice little challenge built into it.
Oh, noticed the little emotional shift right there? From hard to challenging?
What if… What if…
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are
– Anaïs Nin
Your perception of the world is influenced by your experiences, beliefs, and emotions. And there are villains out there, warping your beliefs and emotions. So let’s take them out, one by one, from our academic existence and just vibe?
The villain on my mind lately has been the good old LinkedIn influencer archetype who “knows” all academic life is pain.
Always Check the Bio
I am so tired of this.
Let me explain. I have been selling stuff online since 2007. Back in the day, it was all mostly about people optimizing blogs built on WordPress to sell others’ products as affiliates. It was easy to recognise the reasons behind people recommending products or building some narrative…simply through the tracking tokens in the links.
Now, the game is much more complicated. You can start selling anything in 3 clicks online…and this is precisely what many of the “academia is a deep pit of terror”-type influencers are doing! They are all selling “get out of academia now”-style coaching or courses.
And they play skillfully to our built-in human biases. Negativity gets likes.
Negativity bias in social media is the tendency for negative content to attract more attention, engagement, and influence than positive content.
And the more you consume this poisonous content, the more you will feel sorry for yourself, and the more twisted your worldview will be.
But hey, why care about consequences when there’s engagement to be farmed?
There was a wonderful article in Fortune a few days ago: Gen Z teens tell us why they stopped trusting experts in favor of influencers on TikTok
Long story short, (especially) for GenZ, followers and likes = credibility. So the worst part is, we have a class of social media influencers who never even spent a long time in academia. How are these people the kind of people you want to take academic advice from?
Ah…but they’re credible! Yes, likes = credibility. And negative horror-posting = likes.
Sooo…yeah. You see where this is going.
No hypocrisy here though, I also sell online courses! And yes it’s in my interests to help people see the bright side of academia, and I do that through teaching things related to productivity.
But with all this, all I want is you to do a careful examination of what this world is before jumping into potentially life-altering decisions. And the first super simple step is to start being more aware of your inputs to your world what I playfully call “solosystem.” The concept of systems thinking is perfect here: All you need to do is tweak your inputs, and your outputs will change.
So, what’s it going to be as input? Toxic “academia sucks” influencers or focusing on the infinite potential you have when you just act on it?
Focus as a Master Key to a New Reality
Focus is such a cool concept.
Let me give you a quick example.
You probably have noticed how much of the criticism out there about academia is about ruthless working hours and odd working hours. But so much of all this is completely self-imposed. Let’s start with the obvious:
- Most people could use a little bit more training in bandwidth management
- Most people allow unnecessary distractions to destroy the time they have for meaningful work
- Most people have never sat down and carefully thought about what goals they should be pursuing to begin with
The last one is important; If you don’t set goals for yourself, someone else will. If you don’t learn to boldly click that reject button when yet another review request from a journal you don’t even know anything about hits your inbox, you’re the only one to blame. If you don’t learn to focus on one high-leverage task at a time, you’ll soon drown in things that don’t move your career forward.
And the biggest one: If you don’t learn to take action yourself, you’ll just wait. Wait for what? Exactly… you must have a strong degree of independence in academia, and you must learn to set & smash goals that mean something.
I really like this version of all the Parkinson’s Law diagrams out there:
Just get it done.
We all know what happens when you have a tiny amount of work and a deadline in a month. We tinker around it for a full month, with a weird illusion of “work being done” every day. While in reality, we could just do it in 3 days, and attack (with violence and focus) the next goals that matter.
And when you focus on a single task, you tend to also be happy. Time flies. Useful things get done. And imagine how great it feels when that stuff is also something that genuinely matters in your career and life: it’s a North Star Goal.
Look back at your calendar—maybe just for the past month. Are you working on a goal that you are 100% sure will help you move to the next stage of your career or improve your life in some meaningful way? Or are you just completing tasks because someone else said so? Or are you simply working toward a deadline, keeping yourself busy under the illusion of productivity, just because there’s still time left?
Or, in other words, have you taken the time to set your North Star Goals?
Then look at just your yesterday. When you started to work on a task, did you actually work on it fully or were you multitasking and hopping between dozens of different tabs? Did you shut down the entire world just to do one thing and do it well? And do it to completion? Or were you tinkering a little bit here and there and ultimately getting not much done?
Or, in other words, have you taken the time to learn the skill of focus?
Goals and focus, together, will already give you a wonderful weapon to start making academia..well, great, ahem, again!
Focus on Solutions
And here’s what I want you take away with you today.
Next time you see someone listing 90 things completely wrong and unfair in academia, here’s what to do:
1) Do detective work: Check if they are selling something “exit academia” related and factor that into your consideration before loudly agreeing on everything
2) Audit your mindset: Before smashing the like button and reacting emotionally, stop. Ask yourself: Am I seeing this just because it plays into my negativity bias?
3) Focus on solutions: Why on Earth, why why why, would you spend your days screaming and begging for some mythical “they” to change their ways and the entire academia just magically switch to all flowers and la-la? It’s not going to happen.
What are the solutions? The goals that help you!
The fun part is the world kind of tends to give you what you focus on. Focus on the negativity, and you’ll see dark and mayhem everywhere. Focus on the good, and guess what? Yes! You got it! You see the good everywhere.
Shift your focus, and you’ll shift your entire academic experience.