Wanna be an academic? Embrace rejection
An ode to rituals and resilience - and what the philosophers meant by authenticity
What are the ingredients of a successful academic career? Resilience is a fancy term for people who can navigate the incessant negativity of our age. But what makes you resilient?
I think I may have promised a post on publishing strategy for a while, and that is nearly ready. Then I realised this post is going out on Good Friday, and whether you are of this religion or not, it is definitely a Bank Holiday in many places. So it feels a bit too much like work to write about publishing strategy.
Instead, this is a bit of a reflection on rejections, rituals and authenticity as the important wayposts of academic life.
Embrace rejection
One of the best bosses I ever had (Nigel Driffield, now at Warwick) said one lunchtime, a long, long time ago: “If you are not getting rejected, what have you been doing?!”
When I told one of our PR people, many years later, that yes, we all get rejected, it is not a problem, he went all charming and said, oh no, of course not, you do not get rejected!
Well, I was genuinely nonplussed. Rejection is normal in academic work. It makes for good battle stories to share over a drink.
After the jump, some more reflections on why rejection is one of the most important ingredients of an academic, or possibly any, career.
