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.

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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, tomorrow. I will provide one key action step that you can start taking immediately to improve your funding chances).

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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.

I’ve long thought that university administrations had difficulty with the concept of running their “business” efficiently. Now I have proof.

Someone that I know very well (snicker) has had some funding for a few years to develop software infrastructure for next-gen sequencing data. This is important work, since next-gen data poses quite a challenge. The work was done through NC State funds for cancer research.

After spending a lot of time and money building a great team, and getting the project seriously underway… the person just received an email from an administrator. The administrator said:

“We just got paperwork to transfer all your people off this account. Please let me know what account to transfer them to.”

Haha. Like this investigator has another pool of $200k/year lying around.

Unless the person(s) behind this unexpected move change their minds, it’s going to be interesting times in the affected lab.

Nobody talked to the PI about the status of the project. Nobody gave any warning. Instead, they did the most cowardly thing possible in sending paperwork to a departmental administrator, so she could let the PI know the bad news (with zero notice).

Hello?

Let’s look at this from only one angle: good use of taxpayer funds. Let’s consider how useful it was to spend nearly $400k to build a team and get the project going – and then cancel it without warning.

Bye bye $400k.

Now that I’ve finished my book on grant writing, I think the book I’m planning to write about dysfunctional bureaucracy at universities just moved up in priority.

Last night I had a conversation with someone who is working at the PhD level in a very well known lab, who is ready to give up her science career to do something completely different.

She is not the first. Far from it.

Running a blog and doing consulting related to science careers I get to hear from many people who are struggling. Now is a time of acute struggle for many. A lot of people seem ready to give up – or at least they talk about it.

In fact, at times I’ve wondered whether it is all worth it. I love science, but I also love writing, and would enjoy a career as an author and speaker as much or more as a career in science. I wonder whether the funding struggles, the bureaucratic struggles, the space struggles, and so on, are all worth it.

Before we go down a sinkhole of gloom and doom, this is not entirely a bad thing.

When times are good, it is easy to just ride with the tide, not questioning whether it is really the most fulfilling thing to be doing with your life. It is easy, so there isn’t an impetus to question deeply.

But the present economic circumstances have forced many people to question – and its not just scientists. I’m not making light of the bad situation. But sometimes we do need a wake up call to ask ourselves some deeper questions about what our real purpose in life is.

I was recently doing an exercise of formulating where I want to be in life in 10 years. This exercise was prompted by a combination of factors, but many of those can be tied back to the difficult economy and how it has affected my own life course. If everything was just “easy,” would I be prompted so strongly to ask such a question? Probably not.

Surprisingly, when I recently have spoken to people that I advise and mentor about whether they’ve considered a 10-year plan, almost nobody has.

That’s like wandering around with a tiny flashlight in the dark, with no sense of where you’re going or how you’ll get there. (I’m saying this of myself just as much as of others around me).

I thought for many years that “getting tenure” was my 10-year plan. But, after accomplishing that, I found out it is not a deep and meaningful plan for me. It was quite uneventful when it happened. On the scale of things, getting tenure doesn’t mean I’ve solved HIV/AIDS. It doesn’t mean I’ve cured cancer. It doesn’t mean that I’ve inspired people with best selling books probing the meaning of life.

All it means is that a few committees decided that I passed a particular set of hoops. It has no significance on the large scheme of things, except as a stepping stone to whatever is next.

I’m not making light of tenure – if you don’t have tenure, then getting it may be a big deal to you. But getting it will not do anything more than (perhaps) bring you a sense of relief. It won’t bring much of a sense of really contributing in a meaningful way to the world.

I’ve spent much of my life figuring out how to be “successful.” I spent many years with an unnaturally acute fear of rejection and failure (due to circumstances of my upbringing). That’s why I am now in a place that I can teach others about being successful – because I’ve studied it extensively.

But “success” by avoidance of rejection/failure is not meaningful, either. It doesn’t bring deep satisfaction in life.

Personally, I now believe that the only things that bring deep satisfaction are contributing and creating in the world in lasting ways. That means being a great parent or great spouse, creating ideas and concepts that help people, and actually implementing things that make the world a better place.

You may label me an idealist for holding this view. But this idealistic view has been arrived at through the test of harsh reality. I have succeeded at “not failing” and realized that that isn’t really success.

And that’s why the present difficult career circumstances for many have an upside. They force a deep questioning about what values you really hold.

If you truly love doing science more than anything else, you will find ways to overcome any and all obstacles in your path. It may be difficult and take time, but you will accomplish it. (And perhaps I can help you along the way – I’ve found that I love helping people).

On the other hand, if you have other things that you would enjoy doing as much or more as science, perhaps now is the time to take that next step. I don’t think that things are going to get easier for scientists over the next few years. You’ll have to persevere through tight grant funding, tight state funding, political fighting over scarce resources, and etc. It is hard to persevere through such conditions for something that you don’t truly love doing. Fear (of loosing your job) may be a strong motivator, but it does not lead to satisfaction or joy over the long haul.

If you haven’t yet done so, I suggest you do the following exercise:
Picture that you’ve been given exactly 10 years to live from today. Write down a vision for what would you want to have, be, do, or accomplish. Then, ask yourself: why am I not working towards those things every day*? You may have less than 10 years, or you may have more – but life is short!

If you don’t at least have that kind of “big picture” understanding of why you’re doing what you are doing, then you will spend the next 10 years wandering around in the dark. You’ll look back and wonder where the time went, leading you on a path to nowhere.

* – I’m not advocating that you irresponsibly just quit what you’re doing now. But say that you want to start a new business or be a photographer. You can start working on either one of those things in your off-work time, until you build them up to the point where they take care of themselves. Start now!

Do you need to water down your talk/paper titles so that you don’t offend any reviewer?

Will this increase the likelihood of getting your paper accepted?

I was just at a conference, and after talking to a group of younger scientists over dinner, I heard that one of them later made a comment that goes something like this:

“Yes, promoting your work is good, but you don’t want to offend your reviewers with a title that stands out too much….”

Yes, you do want a title that stands out, period!!!!!

Here’s the thing. I wrote “milktoast” titles for my papers and talks for many years. I was afraid of “offending” anyone. Did that reduce my rejections? No.

I still got plenty of paper rejections. I still had to do long cycles of revision. Having milktoast titles (or milktoast papers) did not avoid that!

No, in fact, if you go out of your way to “blend in” so that you “don’t offend,” you’re going to achieve one and only one significant result: you will be unmemorable.

Think about the “famous” scientists you know. Are they boring people who write milktoast titles and who go around worrying about not offending their reviewers?

Well, when people like Craig Venter, Lee Hood, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, and Richard Feyneman come to mind, I think the answer is clear: these people stand out. And that’s why they’re well known. They have (or had) opinions, and aren’t (or weren’t) afraid to express them.

Is expressing your opinion polarizing? Yes, of course it is. But if you don’t do it, you won’t develop any personal “brand” of your own. You won’t be remembered. You won’t stand out. And your papers will just blend in with the thousands of other papers published every day.

This is true in any walk of life. If you don’t express an opinion, you just blend in with the crowd. You don’t get remembered. That’s fine if you’re in a profession where you don’t need to be remembered.

But in science – if you want people to actually pay attention to you – and perhaps give you funding from time to time – you need to get remembered. It is part of the “game” of being in science. If you don’t want to play it, you will always be disadvantaged, like it or not.

I’m not saying that you should set out to intentionally offend people. You should not. But you should take a stand on matters, and make your work stand out with catchy titles, crisp writing, great figures, and good stories about your work.

And, most of all, you need to realize that promoting (or “marketing”) your work is not a bad thing. The funding agencies spend billions to give us money to do good stuff. What if everyone did their research, but then never promoted it? It would be just about as useful as if the work had never been done in the first place. Not very.

Don’t be timid. Reviewers will reject you, no matter what – whether you are opinionated or not. But if you stand out, and if you take a stand, you’ll also find people who become raving fans of your work as well, and give you glowing reviews. You’ll never get one of those by being a milktoast.

overheard a comment someone made about writing an “interesting” title for