On Keeping One's Chin Up

    "But man is not made for defeat.  A man can be destroyed but not defeated."

        -- Hemingway, "The Old Man and the Sea"

So I am in a land far, far away for a TT fly-out. The job is in many respects my dream job. Far away, but in an absolutely stunning place I have always dreamed of living, and with a lovely teaching load. Yet I absolutely blew the fly-out.  Blew as in tanked, shanked, torpedoed, royally screwed up, mucked up, failed. I had prepared like crazy.  Put together a great talk and teaching presentation, practiced them til I was blue in the face, knew everything about the faculty, grad students, school, its mission, etc. But I got here and...I just mucked it up. Perhaps I practiced too much, or perhaps (and I think this is the more likely explanation) it was the 25-hour airline trip out consisting in two overnight flights, neither of which I slept on, and six-hour time change.  All I know is that I felt like I was operating at about 20% of my normal mental capacity, and that my talk and teaching demo were utter disasters. It was the most embarrassing day I can remember. I knew then and there that I was done: no chance, nada, nil, job be-gone! I went back to my bed-and-breakfast afterwards totally devastated and embarrassed. After Skype-ing my wife of the disaster, I went to bed at 3pm and woke up 20 hours (!) later for my interview the next day.  At least I got some sleep. Yet the interview didn't go a whole lot better. Still exhausted, I answered a few questions poorly and uncharacteristically stammered my way through the whole thing.

It's times like this -- and there are many of these times in an academic career, not to mention life in general -- that one is tempted to give up, if not explicitly, then somewhere deep in one's soul. But it's also at times like this that it can be helpful to reflect on what is the right way to respond...and then perhaps write a blog post about it. ;) Anyway, I want to reflect on this a little bit because, in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, how one responds to failure is one of the very most important things one can learn, not only in an academic career but in life.

Like most people, I have endured many failures in life, both large and small. I had my first dissertation prospectus defense cancelled the night before it was scheduled due to my proposal being crap. I have had papers rejected by countless journals, often with rude, sometimes cruel comments. I have blown interviews. I have blown fly-outs. I have made interpersonal faux pas. I have done wrong. You know, the usual human foibles. The question then of course arises: how should one respond to one's failures?  

I don't know if my response is right for everyone, but I'd like to share it anyway: I immediately get back to work. I move forward. I tell myself, "There is no time to waste. There's no use dwelling on what happened. You can either spend time getting better at what you do, or not." This attitude is difficult to keep up, but I believe it is the right way to go. It not only keeps me sane, it keeps me moving forward (and really, what other direction is worth going?). When I blew my fly-out yesterday, I went back to my room...and wrote an entire draft of a paper from page 1 -- a paper I'm now very excited about. Despite the disaster this trip has otherwise been, I found a way to make something positive out of it. 

Trust me, I'd rather not share my failures. I'd rather not fail at all! But we rarely talk publicly about failure, or how to deal with it -- and I think now's as good a time any that we did. Because I've seen talented people react very badly to failure, by giving up. I've seen people become failures by giving up. I've almost given up many times myself. And yet I believe the most important thing in the world is not to. Failing is painful. But giving up only makes the pain permanent. Do not give up. Move forward. Keep moving forward until you become more capable at what you do -- and if you do, it will probably pay off. There are of course no guarantees in this world besides death and taxes, but still, the world tends to reward those who improve themselves. Move forward.  And then pay it forward. Pass the message along. We owe to it each other to help each other up, and then forward. Or so say I. Or so, at any rate, I ramble. :)

What makes ye of it, Cocooners? How do you deal with failure? How do you respond to disappointment? 

Comments

[Tuomas Tahko]

Wise words there Marcus. Sorry to hear about your fly-out experience, but: you must be doing something right, as you at least got a fly-out!

As it happens, my own approach to failure is very similar to yours -- or at least that's what I strive for. I know those rude and unhelpful comments that you mention, the same goes for funding applications. I tend to wait until my initial disappointment, or anger, is gone. That's mainly because I don't want to be blinded by it when I, say, revise a paper. But the next day is probably good.

As you say, this is something that one has to learn to live with anyway, so we might as well develop a good method for dealing with failure. What you suggest and do is exactly on the right lines.

[Marcus Arvan]

Thanks for the kind words, Tuomas. Yeah, I usually find that it takes me half a day to a day to get my emotions in order, but after that, the nose goes back to the grindstone...

[Trevor Hedberg]

I think there's a distinction worth making here. There are at least two kinds of failures. One is primarily self-created; the other is mostly a case of bad luck. In my days of college tennis, I had many matches I lost to superior players. These were failures of the first kind: I just wasn't good enough. My opponents had superior ground strokes, more powerful serves, superior quickness, better on-court strategies, etc. But there were also many matches I lost to players I should have beaten due to unforeseeable injury or sickness. These were the second kind of failures, ones that really were clearly more attributable to luck than a failure of practice or preparation.

We can extend this to philosophy easily enough. Some papers that we try to write fall into the first category: they just aren't very good, and we know it. Others, however, fall into the second category. Sometimes you write a stellar paper that gets rejected from a journal. It doesn't mean the paper was unworthy or deficient; it just means that this particular roll of the dice at a certain journal didn't fall in your favor. (This doesn't mean the review process is subjective; it just means there are a lot of variables involved. A journal's pool of submissions will vary heavily every quarter, for instance.)

I think the best one can hope for in anything where there's even a hint of competition is to reach a point where your failures are mostly of the second kind. If your failures are more of your own personal doings, then an attitude of changing routines, getting back to work, etc., seems appropriate (perhaps even necessary). But if luck's the only thing working against you, then if you persevere, luck will fall in your favor eventually. At that point, I think making any serious adjustments to your routine is a matter of overreacting.

So I think in assessing how to respond to the interview, it's important to assess whether it was primarily inadequacy in your delivery, preparation, traveling plans, or something else; or an almost inevitable result of traveling 25 hours prior to the presentation and teaching demo. Perhaps its a mixture of these and hard to classify, but I think it'd be hard for anyone to be fully functional after that kind of travel. So maybe cut yourself some slack with this one.

[Marcus Arvan]

Trevor: thanks for the very thoughtful comments. I guess I don't think the one kind of failure (bad luck) is worth thinking about. It's (almost) never *only* bad luck. There's just about always something one can do better -- and I guess I think the best routine is to always conclude that it's not bad luck. After all, even if it is bad luck, you'll probably do more to improve yourself if you assume the opposite, no? Also, I think we all have an unfortunate tendency to chalk things up to bad luck (this totally includes me, by the way) even when it's not. Again, there's almost always *something* one could have done better. Usually, it's something you're not even thinking about. For instance, I have this one paper I've mentioned on the blog before that has been rejected all over the place. This puzzled me, and I thought it was just bad luck, because every time I presented or asked someone to read the darn thing I was told it's good work. Then, finally, after presenting it one final time this summer, I went out of my way to approach someone who told me it was good and asked them what they would do if it was their paper. They gave me invaluable advice. If I had chalked it up to bad luck, I would not have sought the help I needed. While I think there can genuinely be bad luck sometimes, isn't it better to assume that it's not?

[Trevor Hedberg]

@Marcus -- You make some good points, and I mostly agree with you. In particular, I agree that we don't want to become too generous in making excuses for our shortcomings. However, I also think it's generally unproductive to be overly self-critical. Reflective self-criticism is vital to one's self-improvement, but too much of it (particularly when it's unwarranted) can lead to discouragement and even despair. These beliefs could manifest as the thought that one's presentation skills, teaching abilities, writing skills, etc., will never be good enough or that one will never get a job in the current market.

It could be that you are simply numb to this outcome: you may not be at risk of slipping from reflective self-criticism to one of these less desirable states because of previous experiences, your personality, or some other reason. But I think many of those I have met (and myself at times) have generated too much negative energy mulling over past mistakes and current imperfections. I think there's a balance to be struck between being too lax and too strict in one's self-appraisal, and my suggestion in the previous comment was an attempt to strike that balance. Of course, since I doubt there's some magical balance that would fit every single person, a more rigorous standard might be appropriate for some (especially if that person knows he or she is prone to chalk up failures to bad luck when they probably aren't).

I should also add that the more frequently things turn out unfavorably, the more likely it is that these outcomes aren't just bad luck. So as those experiences with your paper continued to repeat themselves, you were definitely right to think that something with it wasn't quite right and investigate. I suspect that our considered views on this topic (at least in practice) are actually quite similar.

[Marcus Arvan]

Trevor: I too think we agree more than we disagree. I've seen many people run into the problem you raise, viz. becoming so overly self-critical that it becomes debilitating. But I wasn't really talking about self-criticism. I meant to say that one's primary aim -- one's routine -- should always be to be a little bit better today than one was yesterday. And this is, I think, an optimistic and healthy way to go -- not to mention the most productive. My point, in other words, is not to blame oneself *or* blame others for one's failures. Either sort of blame seems to me mostly pointless. As my father once told me, all you can really do is control what you can now. The past is the past. It doesn't really matter what went wrong, as long as you
learn from it and focus on improving what you can improve. Anyway, I expect we probably agree on all this. :)