What advice do I give to my students?
Very good career advice -> What advice do I give to my students? by Michael Levin
I’m not a scientist, but the following has been true in my (small, short) career and in friends’ careers that I’ve helped with.
It’s natural, after one has been battling upstream with one’s unconventional ideas for long enough, to get bitter about the resistance. You need to internalize the following: no one is out to get you, no one has time to implement a conspiracy to suppress your ideas. There is no one to blame – all you’re battling is the fact that everyone is busy. It’s on you to make your product irresistible, in competing for people’s limited attention. No one is gatekeeping you; they are keeping their own gates (of limited time and attention), and they owe you nothing. There is no one to be angry at. Just do your thing and use that energy to improve your output.
Don’t pick unnecessary fights. Focus your paper or talk on the big thing you want to shift, don’t include other ancillary claims that will irritate readers and open multiple fronts. Pick the hill you’re willing to die on, and focus your story there. You can pick up these other battles next time. People typically, at best, have the plasticity to adapt to 1 new, uncomfortable idea at a time. You probably have many; resist the urge to core-dump all of them in a whirlwind of stream of consciousness. Decide what each public-facing output of yours is designed to nail down.
Let go of the ego – it’s not about you (even when it’s apparently about you). Science is based on criticism, that’s how it goes. Everyone is fighting their own battle, and has their own stressors that affect how they respond to your material. Don’t spend any time trying to figure out who feels what way about you. It doesn’t matter and it’s not personal. Just focus on bringing the community the best product you can bring. Don’t dwell on the negative or keep grudges.
Related to this last point is a visualization I developed to get over my stage-fright. As a scientist, you will have to do a lot of presentations to audiences (and more broadly, your work product is always being critically evaluated). Visualize yourself on that stage as glass – you are completely transparent. No one can see you – all they see is your ideas and results. It’s the science that’s talking, and no one is there to judge you. They don’t have time or inclination to think about you per se. It’s very liberating to realize that no one cares about you (positively or negatively) – only what you’ve got that they can use. If you are happy about what you’re bringing them, that’s all that matters and you can let it shine.
Do not fight your own success. Here is what success looks like: your crazy ideas become obvious to others, and no longer the wild, brave, brilliant insight. Eventually, if you do your job right, everyone will come around to your view, or adopt your new hard-won methods, and the common narrative will neglect all the travails you had along the way. It can be shocking to suddenly not be the trailblazer, once everyone else catches up. It’s a recipe for misery, if that makes you upset or if you see others jumping on the bandwagon as them “stealing it”. You need to come to grips with the fact that the new idea that only you saw, will eventually be “obvious” if you succeed. Adoption by others is what you are going for. But by the time they do, you should be somewhere else (intellectually), pushing some other new thing that is just beginning the journey from “impossible” to “we knew it all along”.
