This stressed out dude will not bring clarity or focus to writing his grant.  Don’t be like him, it does not lead to success.

To take the stress out of writing, develop a good writing habit

Through my work with academics in grant writing, one of the most common concerns I hear is how to find the time to actually sit down and write. The days of an academic scientist (and most people, nowadays) are chock-full of an endless series of fires and tasks that need attention: hundreds of emails, questions from employees, administrative requests and paperwork, reviewing of papers, helping students, committee meetings, recruiting, and on and on.

It’s enough to make some folks want to sit in the Bahamas sipping margaritas for the rest of their natural lives.  Ok, I must admit, sipping margaritas in the Bahamas sounds appealing even without the excuse of being ridiculously overworked.  But anyway…

All of this comes on top of the bigger tasks of writing papers, writing and applying for grants, and actually doing some science! How to find the time for it all?

In many cases, the answer is this: never. I know plenty of people who work 80 hours a week, every weekend, and never take a break, and are still buried in all there is to do. (Yep, I know what that’s like – it used to be me.  But now I’m a reformed workaholic. Yay!)

Despite the brutal hours, the important work, the big work, gets put off and oft seems to never get done. When it does get done, it’s only at the very last moment, in a flurry of mad, frenetic activity to meet a pressing deadline.

I’m here to tell you (again, from experience), that isn’t a habit that is going to increase your likelihood of success (in grants or much of anything else).

Grants are kinda important (and, no, I don’t write grants using terminology like “kinda,” in case you’re worried about it).  Without grants, there is no funding, no employees, no research, and eventually no job. It must get done.

Yet we procrastinate until the last possible moment, until the deadline looms so large that we can’t ignore it anymore, much like a dump truck bearing down on us in the middle of a crosswalk.  Hurry! Get out of the way!  Write. Don’t sleep. Write. Don’t sleep.  Don’t talk to anyone.  Write. Stuff food down throat quickly. Write more!

Yep, and sometimes I’ve seen an entire grant completed in the week before the deadline (usually not good or successful grants, mind you….)

Besides being an ineffective way to write a grant, this is also incredibly stressful for everyone involved, and often results in poor writing and an unsuccessful proposal.

By contrast, the most successful proposals are usually the ones where the investigators have clarity, focus, and make regular and consistent progress towards the end goal. This goes for papers too.

The pre-requisite to focus

One of the major challenges you may find yourself facing, when presented with a complex task like writing, is simply being present, i.e. being HERE and NOW. No mentally hellish trips to the study section/review meeting. No rehashing of the argument with the collaborator yesterday.  None of that.  Just you and your word processor. Yep, it’s hard!

Presence is a pre-requisite to being an effective writer. You cannot be focussed on a complex task if you are thinking about 100 other things like how am I going to work those budget cuts into my project, Julie’s paper has been on my desk waiting for review for a week, I need to call back my colleague to discuss a potential collaboration, and by the way do we have any food in the house for dinner?

Those thoughts rob the mind of clarity, energy and focus because they put the mind somewhere else in the future or the past. I’ll say it again because it’s so gosh darn important: the mind must be present to the task at hand to be effective at writing.

Being present and focused, however, is not something we generally have been taught much about. Instead, we are usually taught the opposite – how to multi-task, how to plan, and how to analyze past events.

That means if you’re trying to implement this idea of being “focused”, you’re going to have challenges.  Your “focus muscle” is probably going to be pretty weak, much like a flabby bicep that needs a workout at the gym.

You might be surprised at how hard it is to maintain focus on one thing for an extended period of time. Or maybe you’re not surprised. I used to only be able to maintain focus for 5 minutes at a time, unless I had one of those dump-truck sized deadlines looming, that forced me into focus.

But just like the muscles in your arms or legs, regular use and practice will make them stronger. If you make a regular time to focus on writing, your muscle will get stronger until you can be far more efficient with your time (hey, how could I run a $1M/year lab this year, along with blogging, book writing, managing a business, and teaching grant writing workshops – and still have time for sleep and occasional vacations?)

I recently listened to an interview with best-selling fiction author Stuart Woods. He has written over 30 books, and regularly publishes 2 books a year. As a full-time author, you might think he spends all day writing, but you’d be wrong. Instead, he spends 2 hours a day. Every day, at the same time of the day, he sits down to do his work. He spends one hour reviewing and editing his work from the day before, and one hour writing a new chapter. The rest of the day he spends time thinking about plot lines and characters while he is doing other things, but he only spends 2 hours of concentrated work a day. He has developed a practice of being present and focused on his work every day. Because he does this every day, his focus muscle has gotten very strong and now he is very efficient during this time. Efficient enough to complete 2 novels a year, most of which go on to be best sellers!

I offer this example to illustrate 2 things.

1. You don’t have to spend a lot of time each day in order to make good progress. And
2. You do have to spend SOME time each day in order to make good progress.

Set aside a clear and designated “writing time” each day and spend this time working on your grants or papers and you’ll make more progress than you would have thought possible. Best of all, when that grant deadline comes along, you won’t have to pull all-nighters to get it done and you’ll have a clear and well thought-out proposal.

In the next post, I’ll talk about how to find the time and develop your habit of a Writing Hour each day.

p.s. get your free “backdoor to funding” report, and sign up for my upcoming webinar that shows you the three-step model underlying all successful grants, right here.

I did this interview with Nobel Laureate Dr. Oliver Smithies in the Fall of 2010.  In this interview we discussed:

How to make the great escape from academia, and still have a career that feeds your family.

Please ignore that link I gave you in the video, the system failure rendered it nonworking. Instead, you can use this link.

And if you found this useful, please leave a comment or hit that Facebook Like button.

I wanted to find out: what is the most pressing challenge you’re currently facing in your science career, and how can I help?

I used good ol’ Survey Monkey, and got > 200 responses so far. Yay! The results were interesting and a bit surprising to me. They also caused me to go off on a bit of a rant about how to learn effective grant writing. Ok, not really a rant, but kind of a Morgan “being opinionated” kinda thing. Here’s the video:

Hope you find it informative, and if you do, please hit the Facebook Like button.

Cheers!

ps – if you want that link for the grant strategy session that I gave out in the video, it is here: http://grantfoundry.com/grantstrategy.html

Today I awoke, and checked my email early on.  Bad idea.  I ended up wasting a bunch of energy on one person’s negativity that had been aimed towards me.  He wrote: “You have lost credibility as a scientist and have become just another huckster.”  Wow!

I’m a huckster now!? Really?

In tomorrow’s Naturally Selected blog I’ll go into a bit more about what prompted him to do that.  In short, I had sent out an email to a list of folks with a link to a video by marketer Frank Kern.  The video sells nothing, and I stood nothing to gain from sending it, except possibly goodwill (which apparently backfired with a few folks).

Why did I send it? Because I thought it had a good message to share: that what we feed our brains with impacts the actions we take, and the success we get as a result.  Simple but important.

So here is this email (and blog comment) sitting in my inbox this morning, calling me a huckster, and it made me stop to waste some mental energy: “What in the world would prompt such a response??”  I think I have some ideas about the illogical thinking behind the email:

• Anyone who makes real money (like Frank Kern does) must obviously be a scammer, and so anything he says is bad…
• That if I send a message out containing a link to something by someone who makes a lot of money, then I must have some kind of self-interested motive, and be by association a scammer (and worse, huckster). (even if the link itself had nothing to buy…)
• Or, perhaps this: the sender of the email is tremendously resentful of Frank Kern’s success because he does not presently enjoy the same.
• Or, perhaps this: that all people are bad, and trying to rip me off.
• Or ????

All I can say to my erstwhile emailer is this: the video contained a message that you sorely needed to hear, but you were so busy defending your current mode of unproductive thinking that you didn’t even pick up the message.

———

More importantly than all that is the central message that I re-learned for the 50th (or 100th) time: do not check email in the morning, get real work done first. I teach this to others, and I usually follow it, but occasionally I slip up.  Today’s little slip-up reminded me forcefully that I must not make this mistake.  You shouldn’t, either.

If you are familiar with my mission of helping you maximize your ability to promote your work and increase your funding, you’ll know that I spend the majority of my efforts focusing on the positive, all the ways you can improve and be better.

But I need a break.

In this post, I would like to explore failure and your psyche. Still reading?

Great! (I’ve often thought a smaller audience was easier to reach.)

In the world of psychology, there is a concept called locus of control that is used to describe how people view their ability to control things in their life, or in the happenings around them.

There is a huge body of literature devoted to this broad topic.  It has been used in applications with students, in chronic pain management, and in other health-related issues, and, now: grant writing!

People are typically divided into 2 subtypes: those who have an internal locus of control and those who have an external locus of control.

In a nutshell, people who identify as having an internal locus of control feel that they have significant influence over their own state of being, their own life course, or the ability to affect their own world. Patients with chronic pain, for example, feel they have the power to improve their own well being and manage their own symptoms through exercise, rest, etc. to a notable degree.

Those who identify as having an external locus of control rely on “powerful others,” like doctors (or random chance) to direct their lives and state of being. Using the chronic pain example, patients with an external locus of control are far more likely to rely on their doctor to provide some kind of treatment or to give accountability to a larger, nebulous force.

What kind of person are you?

Let’s take this from the medical world to the grant writing world. Have you ever received negative comments back from reviewers that left you feeling incensed that they didn’t “get it,” or that your reviewers were biased, or that the grant system was unfair?

It is very easy to vent frustration at the other guy, the reviewers (I did plenty of this earlier in my career). It’s human nature.

It is also human nature for people to fall into 2 camps thereafter: those who are naturally introspective and, when done venting, are willing to look at their own contribution to the negative reviewer comments. And then, there are those who continue to blame the reviewers.

You don’t have to be a psychologist to see not only the difference between these types of people, but how the latter scenario, the blamers, the people with an external locus of control, can experience failure more often. It’s not a judgment of personal style; it is reality.

At the end of the day, you dreamt up the idea and wrote the grant. It is your responsibility to ensure that your communication resonates with the reviewers.

This locus of control business is a very roundabout way of illustrating that when your grant gets rejected, it is a golden opportunity to learn from your mistakes, hold the mirror up and have some introspection. And if you’re not sure what to do next, ask for help.

By the way, this works insanely well in all other parts of your life, too.

If you want to gain more control over your own grant situation, you can get started, here.

A lot of what you do in science is judged through the lens of who you are. Actually, that’s true of nearly any human endeavor, not just science. But since this blog is ostensibly about science careers, I’ll focus on those.

Honestly, it amazes me that I managed to build up some kind of reputation in my community of peers. It is not like I spent nearly as much effort at this as I probably should have. Yet, a few people have heard of me and my lab’s work. I suppose that is a good thing!

So, just to disabuse you of the notion that I have any idea of what I’m talking about, I’ll list out a few things that may have been important in gaining “street cred”:

1. jumping at nearly any presentation opportunity, except for this weird invitations to go to Dubai that I get on a regular basis.

2. actually putting together a coherent slideshow at said presentation opportunity, rather than just rambling on randomly about my data and putting everyone to sleep

3. acting like I know what I’m doing. At this point in my career I actually do have some bit of clue about what I am doing, but when I started, I certainly did not… Fake it until you make it comes to mind.

4. generate original ideas, and implement them. I have a lot of friends who are great about the idea generation, but fall down when it comes to the implementation part. That used to be me as well. I had far more ideas than implementation. But somehow I managed to get a few key ideas implemented (despite my best efforts to make it much more complicated than need be) – and having done this has given me the leverage to do more of it. Now I focus on implementing, implementing, and more implementing. A few good implementations are far better than hundreds of unimplemented “great ideas.”

5. interact with colleagues. I occasionally do things like invite them to give talks, serve on study section, and so on. This seems to be important, though overall I’m not very good at it, because I’m so busy with the implementation part these days.

6. don’t be a total jerk. Honestly, I had my jerky moments interacting with people in the past, but those were fortunately confined to relatively infrequent occasions. However, I’ve worked hard to sort out the underlying issues I had that were leading to jerkism, and now that I rarely do that anymore, working with others is far easier. It is amazing, but some people will go out of their way to be helpful when I am nice to them!

7. work on stuff people care about. This one is self evident but also seemingly very hard for many of us scientists to actually do. Maybe it is because of the “lone wolf” mythology about how great science discoveries are made. We’re supposed to go off in a lab, working all hours by ourselves on the next big thing… not worrying about what anyone thinks. But unlike fairy tales, in the real world, funding of some kind is necessary to have a lab to work in. To get funding requires actually paying attention to what the community and funders want.

8. knowing when to wrap up a project as being “good enough” and just getting it out the door, rather than trying to perfect it for so long that it becomes entirely irrelevant. Yes, I’ve suffered from that particular character flaw (the perfectionism one), and I have several unfinished papers sitting on my hard drive that will probably never see the light of day. Nowadays, I have no tolerance for perfectionism in my life or lab.

And, in order to stay true to number 8, it is time to wrap up this blog post.

Mostly I get very positive emails thanking me for the free and paid advice I give on dealing with the challenges of a modern science career in these days of shrinking budgets and overworked people.

But from time to time I get an email that is just downright negative.

A few days ago, it was an email that was complaining that I’d taken one of my free grantwriting videos down (on how to write a killer specific aims).  The person was downright pissy about it, and ended the message with “dissapointed.”

I understand.  I’ve done that to others before.  I deserve it, because I’ve given it.

But, here’s a note to both myself and others who would take this tack: it doesn’t get you what you want.

I believe that such an approach comes out of a deep-seated fear or lack of confidence that things will work out.  It is a belief that most people are trying to screw you.

Honestly – for years I went through life thinking that anyone trying to sell me anything – or who worked in tech support for a company that sells stuff – is just there to screw me.

It is a cynical view that produces exactly what it seeks to avoid.  By assuming that someone is trying to do you wrong, and approaching them with that attitude, they are far more likely to want to do you wrong!

My recent emailer is case-in-point.  I had just started a project of reorganizing my videos, and left it unfinished.  It was a mistake.  Now, if she’d just said: hey Morgan, I’d really like to see that first video that you took down, is there a chance you could send me a link? I would very likely have responded positively.  But instead she assumed that I was doing her evil, and took to scolding me about it (note: this was for a FREE resource I was providing).

My response?  Hey, sorry, but I don’t like dealing with negative people, life is too short.

Her response? Your customer service sucks.

My response to her response: You’re not a customer, and my goal is to attract customers for my services whom I like to work with.  I don’t enjoy working with people who are bitter and negative towards me from the start!

Her response: no answer.

I think it is particularly easy to be negative like that when one is feeling cornered and trapped in their job/life situation.  But don’t let that happen to you.  Force yourself to approach people positively, and it will take you one big step towards breaking the whole cycle of negativity.

Last night I met a guy who’s on a death march… (pay attention if you’re in a science career)

No, not physical death of his body, but close -

He runs an Italian market in my locale (I don’t want to identify it specifically – he’s a nice guy and I wish him all the best).

It’s his business that is on the death march.  He is several months behind on rent, and is in a place of desperation.

It shows – he has become so desperate for money to pay the rent, that he’s forgotten a bit about the one and only one thing that could get him out of the mess: great customer service and satisfaction (along with some more marketing to get the word out).

While sampling some great Italian wines, we heard about his story.  Most of it was about stingy customers, a landlord who is inflexible, and so on…  Again, he’s desperate.

Yet his very desperation is making his situation worse.  A few customers might shop out of pity (I bought an extra bottle of wine for that reason) – but most will just feel weird about it and avoid it – unless they think they can get a bargain due to a “going out of business” sale or something. (Hey, I heard of one business that is successful because they perpetually have going out of business sales… funny, that).

This illustrates something that for many people is a loaded phrase: “The Law Of Attraction.”  Most people who teach this law talk about all sorts of metaphysical voodoo and stuff – hence it can be quite controversial.

Yet in practice, it is quite simple.  This guy is so focused on how he’s failing, that his effort, energy, and creativity is not focused on succeeding.  No voodoo there, just a very simple problem with a simple solution.

Sadly, I see the same death march happening with quite a few of my struggling colleagues.  Funding is tight.  Desperation sets in.  People get more grumpy, more competitive.  They alienate people, and loose confidence (having no confidence is a death-knell for a science career).  And so it goes in a spiral downhill.

But here’s the thing.  This guy who runs the Italian market could turn it around with a major shift of his mental approach.  It is not the outside circumstances that are causing his failure – it is the decisions he’s made and that he continues to make.

Same thing goes for science.  Yes, things are tough.  Yes, times have changed.  Yes, we aren’t able to do things the way we did them before.

But if we get pulled into that cycle of negativity — the death march — the game is over before it started.  Once you’re in the death march, it usually takes something pretty major to get you out of it.

So use the “law of attraction” in your favor.  Ignore how “bad” things appear to be, and simply focus on what is within your power to change.  And just do it.

I wish I had time to run a wine shop – it would be fun for a while!

If you’ve ever wondered why “success” is so hard to come by, this blog post is for you.  If you’re already as successful as you want to be, then you probably don’t need to keep reading (and congratulate yourself that you’re in the minority of about 1% of all people!).

What is success?  That totally depends on you.  But if you’re in an academic career, that often means getting a PhD, getting some publications, doing a post-doc, getting some more publications, getting some kind of faculty job, or so on.  If you’re not into the academic thing, you may define success as finding a great-paying job in industry.

Whatever you define as success, the question is: why don’t you have it yet?

You may think to yourself, “Morgan’s going off the deep end with this self-help stuff…” but I want to explain.

Getting a great faculty job, getting grants funded, and getting tenure at a tier-I research U were all difficult.  But you know what is more difficult?  Starting and running a profitable business.  I’ve been involved in six business ventures in my life, four of which no longer exist.

While I often say that getting an academic job running a lab is like running a business, there is one big difference: when you’re in an academic job, you often have a net to save you if you fall.  That’s not the case in the business world.

The reason I bring this up is that when I opened my bike shop, it was a bigger struggle than any of those in my faculty career.  In order to turn that business around, I had to “resort” to self-help.

And indeed, what I learned applies to you if you don’t have the success you want yet: we hold ourselves back from success.

Now that I understand this, I see it all the time – in myself, in my students, in my staff, in my coaching and training clients – in most people I meet.

Today I listened to an interesting bit by a guy Noah St. John about his book “The Secret Code of Success.”  One of the key points of that book is that we are holding ourselves back because we’re asking ourselves the wrong questions.

Yes, the human mind is powerful, and it likes to answer questions.  And in life we often get the answer we’re looking for.

So if you ask: “Why is it so hard to get my PhD?” then guess what: your mind will find all the reasons that it is a struggle to finish.

What he describes in the book is turning that around from a negative question into a positive one:

“Why is getting my PhD going to be straightforward?”  Again, your mind searches for the answers, and finds them.

Normally I might put up some kind of link to the book, but here’s the reason I don’t: my audience is full of techy/geeky(that includes me!)/science types who are often averse to self-help, and even more averse to self-help that contains religious references.  Well, as useful as I think Noah’s stuff is, he does make religious references somewhat often for my tastes.  So I can’t outright suggest that you go read his book unless you’re perfectly ok with that kind of thing.  If you can deal with it, he has some great ideas to share.

But, even if you don’t check out any of his stuff, definitely think about what questions you are asking yourself.  When I started doing that, the result was surprising and very useful.

Get more insights and learn five easy steps to more papers, grants, and name recognition by signing up at the Science Career Foundry.