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, tomorrow. 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.

But you didn’t bother to tell me (nobody did). Please – if you ever see a message like this on my site, let me know!

The problem appears to be fixed now. I’ve submitted the site for a re-review by Google to make sure.

I have a few new blog posts ready as soon as it clears Google.

Until then, I hope you are have a great weekend.

Morgan

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.

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.

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!

Events often conspire to force us to wake up and think about things in a new way. I’d had many discussions about whether the Apple iPad is a “necessity” or just superfluous fluff. Having my iPad grabbed from my hands on a train in Paris forced me to really think about this.

That’s the attitude I’ve received twice now, from two different reviewers, on two different papers.

In the latest case, we did some work related to antibiotic resistance, and we found interesting new pathways activated in one resistant strain.

At the end of the paper, we speculated about what these pathways might be doing. We even came up with a model for it.

We didn’t claim that this was “the correct answer” – we just said, “hey, here’s our model, it’s the best we can come up with given what we know so far.”

The important thing about a model is that then you have something to test.

Science always proceeds in two stages:

1. Start with a model (e.g. a hypothesis)
2. Test that hypothesis, attempting to falsify it

For some reason, certain people seem to think that science solely consists of step number 2 – falsifying.

But, actually, step 1 is just as important, if not more. Step 1 is what leads to the real innovative leaps (and things like Nobel prizes).

But, because it involves “creativity,” and because nobody really understands what “creativity” is (a topic for a future book of mine), it gets swept under the rug.

Hence, when we use our creativity to speculate and build a model of what our results might mean, we get reviewers who say: OMG, hey, that’s way too speculative! You shouldn’t put that in your paper!

Let’s consider two scenarios:

1. We publish a paper with just the results, giving no interpretation/speculation.

2. We publish a paper with the results plus our speculative model of what they mean.

Which one of those two papers is more likely to lead someone to follow up to actually figure out what is going on?

In case number 2, where we provide the model, it is easy. We’ve provided a model, and all someone has to do is to test it (or prove it wrong).

In case number 1, we’ve only provided some data. Someone else can go test it to make sure that their data produces the same results – but if they also refuse to speculate about what it means, their paper will be even more boring than ours (unless it is a conflicting result).

Speculation is the cornerstone of science. It is what pushes things forward. I don’t like reading papers that leave me without any speculation as to what the results mean – they are dry and boring. And I certainly don’t like writing such papers because they are dry and boring.

As long as speculation is labeled for what it is, nobody is being misled. Any reader can choose to agree with it or disagree with it. In fact, that goes for any model of anything – they are just models, and they’re all speculative.

This comes back to my core motto: don’t be afraid to be proven wrong. You may be wrong. But if the fear of being wrong prevents you from speaking out and arguing a concept to the best of your ability, you’ll go forever unnoticed, into obscurity. I’ve decided that obscurity is not for me. What about you?

———

ps – The paper was accepted with only minor revisions, despite the objections of the reviewer over our speculative model.

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

As we climb up the science career ladder, time pressures become ever more acute, leading to a sense of frustration at all that remains undone, at ever growing stacks of papers, and at ever piling up emails.

I’m acutely familiar with this from the juggling act that is my life – having built a large lab and two businesses while finding some time to spend with my family, without good time management my ship would have already sunk.

There are tons of time management systems out there, but a few that I’ve found that have really helped manage an insanely busy life.

A few years ago, I started using David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD), with the software tool Omnifocus. The idea behind this system is collecting and processing all tasks through an Inbox, then sorting things into projects with a focus on the “next action.” When it comes time to actually do stuff, you then sort things by “context” (e.g. phone, office, car, errands, kids) so that you can accomplish like tasks altogether.

I “got a lot done” with GTD. But I found two problems:

1) The system gives little guidance on prioritization. I got a lot of small/urgent tasks done, and the big, not so urgent, but most important tasks kept getting delayed. That’s because my list was 100′s of items long. So anytime I looked at it, there was always something there that I “should” be working on. I found it pretty hard to ignore those many “should be doing” items in order to focus on the “really important” but less urgent things, like writing several books, getting manuscripts out the door, and so on. Hence, those big things sat undone, until they too grew urgent (like grant applications).

2) It took a lot of time to process and review the ever growing list of tasks and projects I’d developed. Over time, I became more ruthless about trying to exclude the unimportant – but the lists were still very big and time consuming.

After a few years of this, I discovered Simpleology by Mark Joyner. He wrote a book by that name, but he also has a free online training that covers the same material (so I haven’t bought the book).* The crux of Simpleology is placing your “big picture” goals into the system, making a clear plan on how you will achieve those big picture goals, and then by using the web-based “desktop cockpit,” being reminded each and every day about what your big picture goals are. The system asks you to take at least one concrete action every day moving towards those goals.

Initially, I found this to be a “miracle cure” for the problems that had plagued me with GTD. Every day I would enter something into my list – like working on my book manuscript – that moved me towards that big picture. I was no longer permanently lost in the trees, and I could occasionally see the forest.

But then I encountered a few problems with Simpleology:

1) The reality is that there are many small things I do need to remember and attend to – but only after I work on those big things. I tried managing all the “small stuff” intermingled with the “big stuff”, and my Simpleology daily list started becoming very long. Then when I sat down to start working on it, I’d quickly reach overwhelm – only completing half the tasks on my list each day (or less), and having a large list to carry over and deal with the next day. Soon, I was so overwhelmed by the list of small things to do, that I didn’t feel that I could commit the time to the big things. Back to square one.

2) Simpleology does not run well on the iPad because part of it is Flash based, and I use the iPad for managing my life. So then I had Omnifocus on the iPad keeping track of one list, and Simpleology with another list, and I’d try to manually keep the two lists in Sync. This failed quickly.

Since then, I’ve made two big steps forward in realizing how to deal with these issues of balancing the “big but not urgent” vs the “small but urgent.” First, Steven Covey’s book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” reminded me about the vitality of staying focused on the “Important” things to go where we want in life, rather than just letting the “urgent” drive us to some random destination. Second, I signed up for a new and more expensive program on Time Management that really drove Covey’s point home in a deeper way. I’ll talk about that program in a future post.

The combination of these things has led to a new and improved approach to time/life/energy management:
1. Spend time in the morning to get in a focused, calm state of mind before working. This includes exercise, a soak in the bath, and eating a low-carb, healthy breakfast.

2. Leave email and phone turned OFF and unchecked. (I have a special private email address that I will sometimes check only for urgent issues).

3. Go through the Simpleology Daily Target Praxis (DTP) to focus on the “big/important” stuff for the day (items that fit with long term goals). I restrict this to 2-4 big items I want to accomplish for the day, such as writing a chapter for my book, editing a manuscript, etc. The Simpleology DTP also reminds me to each day focus on doing one thing to optimize my time/energy/money (alternating).

4. When random thoughts or issues arise that need later attention, I put them in my Omnifocus (GTD) inbox.

5. AFTER I’ve done the major things for the day, I check email and turn on the phone. I put all the assorted stuff that’s incoming into my Omnifocus.

6. I spend 1-2 hours going through the Omnifocus system to figure out what “urgent” tasks I will take on, and I do those. This includes responding to emails, making and returning various phone calls, etc.

7. Once I’m done with #6, I turn off email again. If there’s time, I work on another “big picture” item, or I focus on family time.

8. I do not multitask, except during step 6 (and I try to minimize it then). It is inefficient.

*Be forewarned, when you sign up, you’ll be presented with several offers for other products (that’s how he makes money on a free product), and that rubs some people in the wrong way. It made me suspicious at first – but once I overcame that (which took several months), and dove into the system, I realized that as a free product, there’s incredible value here. Unfortunately, sometimes we humans don’t know what is good for us.

**There are several affiliate links here through which I may earn a small commission if you sign up, to support my further blogging and science career efforts. I prefer supporting the website that way than having huge flashing banner ads all over the place. As always, I only recommend things that I have used personally and that I would recommend to a friend or family member.

This is a slight but important digression: Getting a grant is all about leverage. The money that a grant brings in allows you to do things that involve other people’s time and energy. Hence you can accomplish far more than you would by yourself. (And if you’re a faculty member, you might be so overloaded with stuff like teaching and committee work that your time for actually doing research is approaching nil).

The leverage you get involves not only money, but people. That sounds obvious, but the way I see some leaders treating their teams of people, it is obviously not obvious to everyone.

Money is a motivator for people, no doubt. But if you try to motivate us humans to succeed with money alone, you will fail in the long run. We will loose motivation.

You have to motivate people with things beyond money, i.e. being involved in something important and meaningful, being appreciated for the work done, being flexible and appreciating that people are not machines that can work around the clock with no breaks, and other intangibles like that.

And here’s the relation to grant writing. If you can manage to build a great team by doing these things the right way, you have a far better chance of getting your grant funded.

This comes from some reflection I’ve done about why some people who write a great grant still struggle getting it funded, whereas others seem to breeze through review to get funding. I reflect on my own successes and failures in getting funding. I’ve noticed a key element in the successes I’ve had: Building a team, and talking about that team in my proposal.

One of the key things that must go into any grant is “Who” – i.e. who is the applicant and are you credible? I go in depth with this concept both in my online grant writing course and in an upcoming book that I’m finishing (to be announced soon). But suffice it to say, without a solid “who,” it is nearly impossible to get funding.

And reviewers are smart (because “they” are “we”). We realize that if you’re a busy academic, you probably don’t have time to do the work yourself. We realize that to be successful, you will need a team of great people.

This is why the old adage that “it takes funding to get funding” is so often true. If you have funding and use it wisely, you will have a team in place for your next grant application. If you don’t have funding, then it’s likely you won’t have a team. Then when you apply for funding, your personnel section will be notably thin.

I realize that not everyone wants to build a team. Some of us want to go off and do our own research without anyone bothering us. If you want to do that, don’t take a tenure track faculty position! Instead, find a research scientist or research faculty position… Because if you’re on the tenure track, you will have to build a team to be successful in balancing all the demands thrown at you.

Here are a few ideas of how to build a great team:

1. Don’t rush your hiring decisions! Take your time to find great people, it never pays to be in a rush on this step.

2. Don’t rely on graduate students as just a source of “cheap labor.” “Cheap” comes with multiple costs, including the toll it takes on the student, and that students have many other demands placed upon them aside from just being your employee, so they can’t always focus on the things you want done. Additionally, students will graduate, leaving no continuity. Instead, consider adding a permanent staff member to your team. If you get a good one, you will find they have focus and continuity that grad students don’t have. When you do have graduate students, you will have a staff member “built in” to help train them and mentor them (since you’re probably too busy to do as much of that as you’d like).

3. Don’t be afraid to get rid of unproductive people on your team. This is one of the hardest things many of us face. Sometimes we can turn around an unproductive person with some additional coaching and interaction. But don’t let a bad situation fester just because you’re afraid to do something. This doesn’t help you, nor does it help the unproductive person – because if they are unproductive, there is something about the situation making them unhappy. Letting this persist will only harm you in the long run. The times I have not made the “hard” decision early on, I have very much regretted it later.

4. Treat people like people, not machines. People have lives. They need breaks and vacations. They need a family life. They need inspiration from you. If you treat them like a machine, expecting them to work 60+ hours a week constantly without a break and without any positive encouragement or inspiration, they will burn out (and likely come to resent you as well). A burned out, resentful employee is not a recipe for productivity, even if they are physically present all the time (because you require it). In the long run, you’ll face many more decisions of the step #3 variety of having to let people go. It is no fun, and it is not good for your long term productivity, so don’t do it.

If this concept team building to improve your grant funding and leverage resonates with you, I suggest that you do a short exercise right now. Sit down for a few minutes, and write out the expectations you’ve put forth for your team. Then read what you wrote, and assess whether you’re treating people like people, or like machines. Then make a decision to do at least one thing today that treats people more like people. For example, talk to someone who recently accomplished something good (even if it is small) and congratulate them and thank them for their good work.

You will feel better, and you will be amazed how those little things will help reenergize the person on the receiving end.