(Continued from Part I)

2. “The science/project/idea should stand on its own.” Many a novelist and painter has died poor and bitter having clung to this belief their whole lives. When I tell people that my mother was a successful artist (successful meaning it provided her a living income), most people are amazed. I’m not. She quickly figured out the basics of how to “market” her work. This wasn’t rocket science – she did things like getting the right kind of paintings exposed to the right buyers (e.g. ones with money) at the right time. But, if she had just taken the attitude that “my art should stand on its own” and not done any marketing, I’d probably be stuck supporting her financially right now. The same goes for your project.

3. “Marketing is not an unbiased, independent science, and we want to avoid anything that isn’t rational and logical” – This is perhaps the biggest mistake in thinking you could make when it comes to grant writing. Let me make a bold claim: it is impossible for a reviewer to make an unbiased, independent assessment of your proposal. Let me prove it: nobody can accurately predict the future. Your proposal is about a project that hasn’t been done (or completed) yet. Because of that, nobody can know whether your project is going to be successful or not. When your proposal is weighed against a set of other proposals (for none of which the future can be known), how can your reviewers choose? Certainly not by logic alone, since logic can’t predict the future. Hence, your reviewer is going to rely on something else – intuition, interest, excitement, etc. In other words, the reviewer is relying on those “touchy feely” things, and in order to optimize your chances of success, you have to get him or her excited at an emotional level. This means you have to have a great project – and sell it really well!

You may still object to this notion. You may be someone who just dislikes the whole idea of going out and “marketing” yourself and your work. That is totally fine if you are content with always working for someone else who will do that “marketing” for you. But if you are or want to be an independent leader (e.g. a professor leading a lab, a business owner, etc), you will have to adopt this mindset – or struggle.

I’ll give you one action step that you can start taking immediately, and in the next post, follow up with more action steps.

This is the single most important step you can take: figure out what your “audience/customer” wants, and produce your project to fit what they want. This means emphasizing what your funding agency and reviewers think is important – not what you think is important.

This is really hard. We all think we’re “right.” Whether we are “right” or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that if you butt heads with reviewers, they will always win. They have all the power in the situation. As one mentor of mine has said, “you can be right or you can get paid.” Which is more important to you? You have to make a decision on that point. If you decide that getting paid (i.e. getting money for your project or idea) is more important, then you’ll have to drop the “I’m right” approach.

Instead, you’ll need to figure out how to fit what you want in the context of what your funding agency and reviewers want. This can usually be done using a “piggyback” approach. You satisfy the needs of the agency, and your own ideas come along for the ride. In this approach, you don’t emphasize your own “rightness,” instead, you simply point out that there is this interesting extra thing you plan to do that may give some additional payoff. That way, you transform your idea from a potential liability into a bonus.

I’ve realized that the person I talked to very much held the “I’m right” approach. Most of us have that – especially if we’ve risen to the highest levels of education and training. But at the same time, I know that the lab she works in has struggled for funding. I can say with confidence that if they could drop the “I’m right” approach, they would have far less struggles with funding.

To your success,

If you’d like to dive more deeply into the concepts here, to double your funding and halve your rejection rate, grab your free “Back Door To Funding” report.

Yesterday I was talking to someone I met on a bike ride about the grant proposal writing tips that I teach here and in my online grant writing courses. I mentioned that I help people get more grants and less rejections by applying the principles of “Marketing” to grantwriting.

Her response?

“Grant writing isn’t like marketing! You have to be a lot more technical in a grant.”

We went back and forth for a while on this, me making points, and her making counterpoints about the nature of science grants, and whether “marketing” was relevant or not.

I pointed out to her that when I mention “Marketing,” I’m not talking about anything underhanded – I’m talking about having a great “product” and then effectively conveying to people – like your reviewers – that it is great. A lot of us have a great project but don’t do a very good job of selling it. Others do a great job of selling but don’t have a good project. You have to have both to really be successful at “marketing”.

Even this didn’t convince her.

Finally, I gently mentioned my track record on funding, and suddenly she got quiet, so we moved onto another topic.

—

What this conversation tells me is that there is major resistance to the notion of “marketing,” especially when it comes to technical/science projects.

But have you ever asked yourself why someone like Lee Hood or Craig Venter (both very successful modern scientists involved in systems biology and genomics) are where they are?

They are smart scientists. But are they really smarter than you or I? I’ll bet they are not smarter scientists than we are.

But they probably are smarter when it comes to marketing their science. They know how to get other people onboard and supporting their ambitious plans. They could not have done the work alone – they both have relied on huge amounts of help from other people. This includes everything from financial backing to creative new approaches to problems, contributed by others.

Along the way, I’ve heard some of the following objections to “marketing”:
1. “It is underhanded” – this misperception is based on bad experiences with the worst kind of marketers, such as siding salesmen, telemarketers, etc. But think about this – have you ever bought a product from a Fortune 500 company? If so, in all likelihood it was because of their marketing efforts. The best marketing is “invisible” to the consumer – a far cry from the “pushy salesman” that you might think of when the word “marketing” is used (in the video, I use the example of a Siding salesman). Apple is a great exemplar of this – they do very good marketing, but in a low key way. Without Marketing, they wouldn’t exist as a company, to continue producing the great products that they do. Marketing is vital to their survival – as it is to yours if you want to be a leader who is responsible for a lab or for large projects.

(To be Continued in Part II. I will provide one key action step that you can start taking immediately to improve your funding chances).

—-

We all waste too much time on grant writing. If you want to stop wasting your time, double your funding, and halve your rejections, sign up for the free “Back Door To Funding” report.

Over at the Naturally Selected Blog I’ve been writing the occasional post about science careers. The most recent post: “Who are you to deserve grant funding?” garnered a few “skeptical” responses.

One writes:

A very plausible pep-talk, but what objective evidence is there that excellence and self confidence are the most important, or even significantly important, determinants in grant funding? I know a lot of anecdotal evidence to the contrary, including my own experience. I know, I know, the purpose of a motivational presentation is to energize and inspire, and toward this useful end, fairy tales may serve better than facts. I’m just saying.

This person missed the point of the post entirely (and he is also wrong about the self-confidence issue).

First: Self-confidence is critical in any human endeavor – especially one as complex as grant writing. All great accomplishments come from a sense of “confidence” that we can pull it off. If we don’t have that confidence, we don’t even get started. Fait accompli. Study the history of any great accomplishment, from flight to relativity to the lightbulb, and you will see that the originator had confidence in their ideas and their ability to implement them.

Second: this wasn’t about having self confidence per se – it is about knowing that you are doing worthwhile work, and being willing to show that in the proposal. The commenter says he knows of “anecdotal evidence to the contrary.” What, exactly, is that evidence? I’m just saying that if you don’t have the confidence in your ability to do great work, then your grant writing will reflect that. But I’m not saying that if you have confidence, you’ll automatically get the grant. It takes a lot more than that.

Third: There is this view of the world – particularly widespread in scientific circles – that we are just machines, part of a big universe that is like a clock winding down. In that view, everything is pre-destined. We are given certain talents and circumstances, and we have no control over what happens beyond those things we were given. That’s because a machine is deterministic, meaning that its ultimate trajectory is completely determined from the beginning. However, taking that point of view is both contradictory to many observable facts, and more importantly, if you act like that’s true, your life will go nowhere.

The poster’s comment reflects this deeply-held point of view. “It’s all fate” is the underlying message here. Belief has no role. The clock was wound so that you’ll either get the grant (or not) and there’s nothing you can do. It’s a “fairy tale” to believe that you can improve your odds, or do better.

But this whole universe-mind-as-a-machine is just another fairy tale!

Hence, if you adopt that view, you’ll permanently suffer from the view that life just happens to you, and there’s nothing you can do.

In the meantime, people who don’t suffer from that view will continue inventing, creating, and building.

And that’s what grants are ultimately about – getting the funds to create, build, invent, and test.

We all live within our own particular “fairy tales”. There is no objective reality that the human mind can grasp. Reality is far too big for our minds. We tell ourselves stories in an attempt to make sense out of the bigness of it all.

Which story are you going to tell yourself? I choose to tell myself stories that will help me accomplish more of what I want and less of what I don’t want.

Today I had a conversation with someone who is in the middle of a science career, and is having trouble with getting grants funded.

It seems like there are a lot of us mid-career people who are having struggles of various kinds. My goal is to help with those, in any way I can.

In this particular conversation, we touched on the topic of the importance of having papers published in “reputable” journals to get your grant funded. Journals like Nature, Science, PNAS, and etc.

I ended up with a somewhat contrary view to the “conventional wisdom” on this point.

I’ll explain it with an example. Let’s say you’re on a study section, and you have two grants to compare. All other things are equal (and you do not know either author personally), but this:

Grant A was written by a senior scientist who has had 9 Nature/Science papers over the past 10 years on the subject. He is proposing to continue extending the work, by studying new molecular players that may be involved in the pathway. It shows some promise for moving the field forward, but is not revolutionary.

Grant B was written by a newer scientist who has no Nature/Science papers, but does have one paper in a specialist journal on his brand new approach for solving a disease, and in his grant he’s proposing to further develop this promising new approach.

Which one would get you more enthusiastic? More of the same, or something new?

For better or worse, we are a society that thrives on newness and innovation. It has taken us very far (and occasionally led us into troubles, like inventing the atomic bomb). We like the new, and we’re not so keen on the same and the boring.

Given what I just wrote, I would be hard pressed to see how the first proposal would get more enthusiasm than the second – despite the lack of Nature/Science papers for the second grant.

This is especially true because the senior researcher has been working on the topic for 10 years. Let’s say that topic is Cancer (a favorite of mine, since it claimed my father’s life). Now, if the senior researcher had 10 years to work on it already, and he’s only made “decent” progress – but no big leaps – it starts making a reviewer wonder if it wouldn’t be better to invest in a new approach.

I believe this is the greatest challenge that lies in waiting for mid-career investigators. At first, your work is often seen as being novel and new by study sections. But after your second or third funded grant on the subject, it starts growing stale. It just isn’t exciting anymore.

Therefore, I’d argue that the number of high-profile publications is actually less important than the amount of (feasible) innovation present. I think that taking your field in a new direction is a far more interesting thing to most reviewers than just having a bunch of great publications.

So, if you are having mid-career funding challenges, think about the science that you’ve been doing, and ask yourself: has it grown a bit stale? Or is it fresh and new? If it is stale, how could you renew it?

——-

BTW – I’m not saying that “selling” something new is easy. It never is. That’s what “Marketing Your Science” is all about. (And, yes, I’ll finish that book someday, after I’ve finished some of the many other projects I have going on).

When we get our grant rejected, it is easy to point the blame at the reviewers. “Those
stupid reviewers, they didn’t get it.” While that approach may be emotionally satisfying and ego-stroking, it doesn’t
solve the problem. Your reviewer didn’t understand your proposal, and there is only one person to blame for that.

Today I had a conversation with someone who is now working for free at a major academic center.

Yes, that’s right. This person is no longer being paid a salary – but is still working.

The center that this person is working at brings in a few hundred million per year in grant money – on top of hundreds of millions in patient care revenues, etc.

But, because the person hasn’t received a grant for a while, the university has shut off the salary.

“Sorry, no grants, no paycheck.”

“Oh, you need to eat? Food? Maybe you can eat agar left over from the latest experiment while you wait for three months to see if you’re graced by the roll of the NIH grant dice.”

“By the way, we still expect you to teach that course next fall for all the med students, but we don’t have any money for your salary to do that – you’ll have to milk the NIH for that.”

This is taking things too far.

I’m calling a spade a spade – and this is the worst kind.

Universities seem to have gotten this notion that this is a “business” and that all their scientists are “businesspeople”. This is especially true in academic medicine.

But I’ve got news for the administrators who think they are being so smart by running things “like a business:”

Yes, in a business, salary can go to zero if you’re not “productive” enough. No difference here.

But, in a business, salary can go to millions or billions if you’re extremely productive.
BIG difference here. In a business, there’s huge upside potential. In an academic job?
Not so much, these days.

Basically, what the university is doing to this person (and many are doing to many people) is saying: you’re taking all the risk on the downside, but you get none of the upside potential.

You get no grants, you get no salary.
You get millions of dollars in grants, and you get no extra salary*.

It’s not the way to motivate people, folks. At least not the really smart and really capable people. They will see right through the ruse (why do you think I own two businesses? I don’t want to miss out on the upside potential of my own particular skills and talents).

I’m happy to take on the risk of my salary going to zero – as long as the university is happy to pay me at least 30% of the total grant revenue I bring in each year. (ummmm errrr maybe I shouldn’t be giving them any ideas about “businessifying” academia even more)

It is saddening to me that the academy has gotten to this point. I understand that everyone has big budget pressures to deal with. I try to be sympathetic about that. But the question that admins should be asking themselves are, “what are the long-term ramifications of my budget cutting decisions?”

The long term ramifications of putting people in a situation where there is only downside but no upside is low morale, and a flight of talent.

When the talent flees, the revenue will drop.
When the revenue drops, more budgets get cut.

And things go into a death spiral.

That’s not the way to run a business, folks. Most businesses who go into that kind of death spiral die (or get bailed out by the government).

Universities: treat your scientists (and all your people) well! You should be treating them like kings and queens, not like peons. These are the people that make your university great – and bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in grants.

Universities administrators that “get this” will be leading successful institutions into the future.

For many years I wandered through my career, jumping on various opportunities as they came along, but without a real “direction” for where I was going.

I was fortunate in that I made some good choices – getting into bioinformatics early on, and then getting into proteomics early on – before the fields became popular. But, despite the outward success this has brought to me, I’ve often struggled with, “who am I?”

For years the “who am I?” question was subsumed by goals, the latest being “getting tenure.”

But here’s the thing I realized once I had achieved that goal: I was doing it, because it was the thing to do. Not because it fit into some kind of “grand plan” for my life.

I’m glad to have done that, but after doing it, I felt a noticeable void: what next?

Tenure is a huge goal for many people, and a lot of those I’ve spoken to after they got tenure felt that it was anti-climactic.

I would go one step beyond that – it is a “life crisis” inducing event if you’ve been focused on it too much.

That’s why it is so important to have a picture of your ultimate life and goals in mind – hopefully before going for tenure (or going for the faculty job, or the postdoc job, or graduate school – or, anything!)

Because then, when you achieve one goal, you can move onto the next goal that fits into your grand plan – rather than just finding yourself having completed this big thing, and wondering, “what next?”

In my own case of assessing “what next?” and “who do I really want to be?” I’ve figured out a few things:
1. I enjoy writing – I have a whole slew of books to write, and I’ve been reenergized in getting my first book done so that I can move onto the next one. The first book is titled “The Golden Ticket in Science: Funding and Recognition Through The Power of Marketing”. Keep your eye out, or sign up for my mailing list if you want early access (that’s the big subscribe box on the upper left).

2. I enjoy helping people become better at what they do. While I used to think that I enjoyed programming computers, I’ve realized the challenge of “programming” people for success is both bigger and more rewarding for me.

That’s why I’m doing this whole blog thing (and my grant writing course http://tinyurl.com/3a8uhzq
, and future courses to yet be named). To help you be more proactive in your own life, and achieve your goals. Yeah – it sounds rah rah (like a cheerleader), but sometimes cheerleading is necessary.

Besides, I want more happy, proactive scientists out there solving the important problems in our world – and less unhappy, reactive scientists who struggle with things.

So go out and be proactive. Define who you want to be when you grow up. And then start moving towards it!

I’ve learned in my journey so far that I really enjoy helping other people become more effective scientists (and human beings!) I have gone through many struggles at every stage of my career – and I’ve rarely had anyone take me by the hand and show me the way. I’ve had to grope and grasp and struggle to get here. Doing so has given me some insights that may be useful to others. Sharing those is why I’m doing this.

And I look around myself, to see some of my colleagues who’ve learned to become tremendously proactive about the specific aspect of doing their science – but not so much in other aspects of their life or career.

Very few science mentors (at any level of one’s career) teach the kind of things you might learn from reading Maxwell Maltz, Steven Covey, Mark Joyner, and others whom I’ve learned from about how to be a more effective human being.

It is unfortunate. Just yesterday I was talking to someone who knows of many mentors who force their graduate students to be in the lab 70 hours per week, always working, always producing.

That is “reactive” thinking, not proactive thinking. It is reacting to the question of “what if my grant doesn’t get funded?” “What if my competition scoops me?” “What if my graduate student slacks off?”

But forcing someone to work 70 hours per week doesn’t turn them into a good – or proactive – scientist. In fact, I’d argue that it’s the opposite. By forcing someone to adhere to a rigid schedule (or else….!), it is teaching them to continue to be in a reactive mode. Instead of teaching them the independence of becoming self motivated, they learn to be motivated by external influences (the threat of being kicked out or at least scolded).

The one Nobel laureate I know doesn’t work in the lab 70 hours per week because someone is forcing him to! No – he is doing it because he loves it! And so every one of those 70 hours is spent in proactive mode (at 80+ years old, he’s doing it because he chooses to, not because he has to please anyone else).

But each person has to figure out whether they “love it” enough to spend that kind of time on it. I argue that to be a successful scientist doesn’t require working 70 hours per week all the time. There will be some weeks like that – and more (I’ve had 100 hour weeks when working on grant proposals).

Being proactive is far more important to success than working all the time in reactive mode. I would bet money on the proactive person who works 40 hours per week having been more productive after 10 years than for the person who works 70 hours per week in reactive mode.

There are two distinct mindsets among many scientists about grant writing. One approach is to write many grants, to “play the odds”. Necessarily, when quantity goes up, quality goes down. Another approach is to write less grants but of higher quality. These take more time, but may have better odds of getting funded. Which way do you think Morgan advocates for? Find out in today’s episode of The Not So Boring Scientist. Leave a note in the comments if you disagree!

Morgan recently heard from someone that a good grant proposal must start with “In this proposal we ” and it must be followed by a hypothesis that will be tested. Harumph! Nonsense! First and foremost, a proposal must solve a problem that someone wants solved! If a hypothesis is part of solving that problem, that’s fine and good. But just having a hypothesis doesn’t do anything to convince reviewers that the work is interesting or worth funding. Convincing them of those vital things (interesting and worth funding) is all about psychology, not about “having a hypothesis”. Morgan delves into this issue, and mentions an upcoming series on grant writing that you won’t want to miss.