Triggered by a question on Twitter, from Jessica Osterhout, some advice for academics. I posted it as a reply on Twitter, but am reposting (and expanding) here:
Selling and networking are a part of the job, as much as anything else. You can and should get better at it1
Written rules are often guidelines
Respect people, but not institutions2
Distinguish tasks that need your best (typically, your science) and those that don't (typically, internal tasks)3
Get mentorship beyond formal supervisory relationships
Social media is very informative, but don't anthropomorphize social media personas
Most social media "advice" is advocacy. Do not blindly follow it!4
Publications are 2-3 years behind the state-of-the-art. It’s like seeing the light from the stars: always out of date and subject to red shift. Conference presentations are 1-2 years behind. The cutting edge is in private meetings and emails
There are minor conflicts of interest everywhere: between you and your supervisor, between you and your students. The common way that academia deals with this is to pretend they don’t exist and use moral pressure to get compliance.5 Choose instead to deal with them openly and barter-and-trade6
There are many ways of being successful7
Nothing succeeds like success
Better is better. Don’t stick to bad plans8
There is a lot of noise in what works or does not work. Matthew Effects are everywhere. There are right and wrong lessons from this
Being too cynical is as simplistic of a view of the world (and ultimately very damaging to your career and to your soul) as being too gullible. Teenagey naïve cynicism is a spiritual trap9
Photos of the day
This is not specific to academia. No matter your career, once you rise up, there are only two jobs: sales or politics. Find out which one you prefer and are better at (some rare people can do both)
Institutions don’t respect you
A large element of becoming more efficient is learning to recognizing the set of tasks for which half-assing is too much ass. Another element is not doing things (you can delegate or say No to many things)
Except for this post
Part of the moral pressure is denying that moral pressure is being used
These topics should be dealt with as standard project planning issues instead of taboos, but some people get very uncomfortable at even acknowledging that interests are not perfectly aligned.
In other settings, we could also use capitalism to solve the conflicts of interest, e.g., pay people for their services. This is harder to do in academia
There are even more ways of being unsuccessful
If you promised to do something, but later realize that there’s a better thing you can do instead, 99% of the time, you should do the better thing. You will be rewarded for it. Sometimes, it may be strategic to communicate this in advance; sometimes, you may need to retcon your intentions; but often you can just boast about it and nobody will care about your original intention
If you find yourself in the 1% situation where it’s better for you to do the worse thing, think about what mistakes got you in this position so you can avoid it in the future
Often this naïve cynicism is cope for a skills issue: see first point and git gud at selling instead of falling into the trap of thinking that salesmanship is always a bad thing