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🍕 Free leftover food in the kitchen – first come, first served!

As a PhD student, those emails were great – I’d drop everything and sprint to the tea room. Free food – what’s not to love!

Two decades later, I still have that instinctive reaction – despite the circumstances (and need for) free food being very different.

It’s a somewhat frivolous example, but it captures something that happens a lot in academia: we don’t always consciously change our behaviour, activities and priorities when our circumstances change.

In this Hacking Academia episode, I look at what happens when we forget to adapt – after a big win or during a tough stretch.

Say you’ve just landed a major fellowship, a big promotion, or secured a long runway of funding. It’s easy to celebrate 🎉 (as you should), thank 🙏 your supporters and collaborators… but then often 𝐠𝐨 𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐚𝐬 𝐮𝐬𝐮𝐚𝐥. 

But that 𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭, which is often your best shot to step back, reassess, and ask:

💡 What *can* I do now that wasn’t possible before?

💡 What should I be having a crack at that I didn’t have the time, the resources or the career breathing space to do before? What risks should I be deliberately taking?

💡 What should I be changing about my priorities and behaviour now, so when I look back at the end of this opportunity, I’m unlikely to 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭 that 𝐈 𝐝𝐢𝐝𝐧’𝐭 𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐈 𝐚𝐦 𝐝𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠?

The same goes in reverse.

When life gets difficult – illness, caregiving, personal upheaval – many people don’t think to not keep going at full pace, not realising that hitting pause or slowing down on the non-critical work is okay. In fact, it’s often necessary.

This is very understandable of course: sometimes there’s legitimately a lot of pressure. But much of the time it’s an unnecessarily-self-imposed pressure (high achievers being over-represented in certain careers…) that doesn’t actually need to be there. Sometimes a gentle nudge from a colleague, supervisor or mentor – “hey you can drop that for a while” – is all that’s needed. 

This video shares a few types of situations where this arises from my own career and from colleagues around the world. 

#HackingAcademia #AcademicLife #CareerDevelopment #PhDLife #Promotion #ResearchCareers #LeadershipInAcademia #Adaptability #RegretMinimization #HigherEd #Mentoring

Full Video Notes

If you have ever worked in some form of office environment, on occasion you may get that wondrous email out of the blue which says something like “free leftover food in the tea room” or “free leftover food in the kitchen, first come first serve.”

For PhD students, and especially when I was a PhD student, this was a wondrous occasion. Free food. You drop everything, run to the cantina or the kitchen, and try to get your hands on some of it.

Nowadays, 20 years later, even though rationally speaking I do not desperately need free food, although I always take it, I still have exactly the same reaction, even though my circumstances have changed radically.

This is an example of an instinctive, not really thinking action that I would take, even though the situation that might motivate how strongly I take that action has changed substantially.

One of the things I now spend a lot of time doing in working with people and mentoring them is managing the fact that they should really change their behavior drastically when their own professional or personal circumstances change. This is something that is very self-evident and obvious, but surprisingly often people do not do it or do not think to do it.

These situations can go two ways. The first is the obvious negative one. Something really bad is happening in your life. Something is understandably distracting you. You cannot really commit to your professional career as much as you normally would.

This is a situation where it is very understandable, and you absolutely should change what you are doing on a day-to-day basis. Yet surprisingly often, partly because people are distracted and not thinking clearly, they do not adjust their behavior enough and end up unnecessarily stressed on top of everything else they are dealing with.

The other situation, which also happens frequently but is perhaps less obvious to many people, is when something really positive happens from a career perspective. Maybe you get a big promotion. Maybe you land a massive grant or fellowship. Something really positive and substantial happens.

People often celebrate these things, as they should, but then they go back to doing exactly what they were doing beforehand instead of stepping back and thinking, everything has changed. What should I really change about what I am doing, not just day to day, but on a much longer time scale as well?

Let me illustrate these situations with a few specific examples that come up quite frequently. These are not hypotheticals. They have come up in my own career and in the careers of colleagues I know around the world.

The first example is a positive one. You land a big fellowship that will fund you to do really research-intensive work for three, four, or five years. It might reduce or remove your need to teach. You may still choose to teach somewhat, but your teaching load may go down. It frees you up to really focus on research.

One of the things people often do not give enough consideration to in this situation is how they should change their research strategy and what they should prioritize doing now that they have landed this big opportunity. Day-to-day little wins may no longer be as high a priority because you now have a longer runway of research funding and can go for more ambitious, big things.

Obviously you still have to fulfill what you promised in the grant or fellowship proposal, but this is your chance to step back and look at the bigger picture. You may also not need to chase all of the career-enhancing CV-stacking activities during this period.

You always need to be conscious of building your CV, but this is your opportunity to allocate some of your best quality thinking, energy, and time to pursuing big-picture, potentially groundbreaking research advances that you may not have had the resources, time, or mental space to pursue before.

Another positive example that comes up frequently is promotion. If you become a member of faculty, you move through the system. In many systems the default top of the academic ladder, unless you move into senior leadership, is becoming a full professor.

In Australia there is essentially one tier of full professor, although there are special chairs and distinguished professors. In many other systems there are more steps, but fundamentally this is the end of the typical academic progression.

When you reach professor, one of the things you can consider doing is again stepping back and thinking about the things you really wanted to do but sidelined because you were focused on career progression. You are no longer justifying that you could be a professor one day. You are a professor.

Of course you still need to meet performance expectations and contribute to the system, but compared to before, when one eye was always on promotion, you are in a much more liberated position. That status opens up opportunities and should prompt reflection on big goals and long-term ambitions.

On the negative side, bad things happen as well. Often something difficult occurs in your personal or professional life and you need to deal with it. One thing I see people do, which is understandable but can be improved, is trying to maintain all of their existing professional commitments without adjustment.

People become emotionally drained. They spend significant time dealing with the issue. They are anxious, not sleeping well, not eating well. Trying to continue with all normal activities, especially research, becomes a recipe for disaster.

Sometimes people just need a gentle reminder that it is completely fine to step back, delay, or defer non-critical activities. It is useful to separate what is truly critical from what can be paused for a few months without the world ending.

Many aspects of research are like this. You can come back to them. It may be disappointing and you may worry about being scooped, but most of the time the world does not end if you pause.

One of the things I have learned the hard way over my career, as a way of forcing myself to step back and think about the big picture, is to remember that when rare big wins come through, there are a few things you should do.

The first is to celebrate. Take the time to celebrate before the next rejection comes along. The second is to thank people. The third is to take the opportunity to grab a coffee, go somewhere quiet, or if you are fortunate enough, go away for a day or two.

This is the time to step back and say, the thing I really hoped would happen has happened. What did I think I would do if this happened? What did I dream about a year or a few years ago? What did I want to have a real crack at?

Many of those thoughts get lost or pushed into the background because of day-to-day pressures and the effort required to make the win happen in the first place.

One of the really important reasons to step back after a major win is regret minimization. Through painful personal experience, and from watching others, I have seen people work incredibly hard to land a fellowship, grant, or promotion and then never really change what they do.

They reach the end of the period or look back years later and realize they did not fundamentally try anything new or take risks, even though they were in a position where they could have afforded to do so.

That can lead to a strong feeling of regret. By stepping back early and deliberately thinking about what you will change, you reduce the chances of regretting how you used the opportunity that came your way.