The number one secret of grant writing is…

I’ll give you a hint below… the advice comes from an 80-minute long teleseminar with Distinguished professor Marshall Edgell, on the topic of writing winning grants.  He’s the guy who turned around my own struggles with grant writing, and got me into a mode of almost continual success.  He has consistently mentored graduate students, post docs, and young faculty on how to be incredible grant writers.  He counts as friends a Nobel laureate and more than one member of the National Academy of Sciences.  He advises those high powered scientists on how to write their grant proposals. His own career has been stellar – he has made many fundamental contributions in microbial genomics and protein biophysics.

This recording is fantastic.  I thought I knew it all by now, but I didn’t.  This one recording is going to help me improve my own success in the future, by succinctly congealing key points that everyone should know who wants to be a successful grant writer.

His advice boils down to a few simple but transformational ways of approaching grant writing.  Almost anyone can do these things.  But if you don’t do them, you’re likely to struggle with grants for your entire career.

In January, you’ll be able to get a copy as part of the online course: “Secrets of writing winning grants.”  Not only will it include this recording with Marshall, but the upcoming recording with professional writer Dr. Schachter, a recording with several other prominent researchers (TBA), and several real-time, live troubleshooting sessions with me helping you figure out how to get your next proposal funded.

So, you could buy it…. ($497 or so – how much is a funded grant worth to you?), and I hope you will.  I would have paid far more than what I’ll be asking for this course, to have this information when I started out as a post doc (or assistant prof).  I would have saved years of wasted time and rejected proposals.

But I’m going to give one copy of the course out for FREE to one lucky commenter on this blog post.

Just leave a comment here about your single greatest challenge in grant writing, before December 25th.  I’ll pick one commenter at random for the free course.

Don’t wait, commenting will be closed on the 25th.

Finally, a hint about the number one secret from Dr. Edgell: visualizing.  You must have a vision for where you’re going, before you can write a great proposal about it.  You have to take the time to sit down and picture “where am I going, and what will the outcome be?”  You have to get excited about it.  Then you have to convey that excitement in your proposal.

There’s a lot more to it than that, but if you use just that one hint, your proposals will improve dramatically.

Addendum: I drew a random number to select one of the commenters, and Dongmin is the winner!  Dongmin will get the $197 course for free, and boost his/her grant writing to the next level.