Finish Your Projects

Kind of about advice from a colleague, kind of about self-sabotage

The year after I went on the job market (academic, byzantine, and weird) an economist I greatly admired agreed to meet with me about my job market paper. I wanted his advice on what to do about the serious and terrible flaws in this paper which had been revealed many times over the course of the market. (The paper is good, don’t get it twisted. All papers, even very excellent papers, have flaws.) He gave me some really useful advice, but the most useful bit of it was at the end of the meeting, when he suddenly became serious in his demeanour and said: There is one thing you have to do to succeed in academia from this point onwards. You can’t succeed without doing this. Obviously, I was interested, so I was like, tell me. Okay, he said, the thing is, it’s only this: you have to submit your papers. 

You might think the job market is the sieve, he said (yes, he said it like this). But it’s not. The real sieve is whether people submit their papers. Submitting your work for publication and review is the bottleneck. There are promising, intelligent, serious researchers who have tanked their own careers purely by not submitting their work.

All of this sounded ludicrous to me, except that this was a serious guy (and he still is) and he sounded very serious and I took everything he said seriously anyway (because I’m like that). But a part of me just didn’t want to believe it purely because it is so stupid. You learn early in life — well, some of us do — that the world is tragic. But did you know it is also stupid? 

I guess I sort of thought, well, sure, we all get nervous about submitting, we get anxiety, we want to hold on, but you have to kinda monitor that and put a self-imposed deadline and make sure it happens, because if you don’t submit then for sure you’re going to fail. Academia is full of mistreatment and injustice, but one thing is correct here: if you don’t submit research papers, then you can’t publish them, and if you can’t publish research papers, you can’t be a research academic. It is the absolute foundation of the job. 

So surely, yes, you might take some time to find your feet after the market (I did) and.or lose a year or two to this basic tendency to procrastination and denial (did that also), but the tenure track isn’t that long and without submission failure is assured, so after that you’d wise up. You’d have to. Here comes the anvil; get out of the way, right? Right?

It’s kind of strange and surreal and cool to remember how cute and idiotic I was, how firmly I believed that people’s conscious, rational minds are usually in control of their actions — at least the actions where it really counts. You’d think “definitely being fired” would be enough incentive to get on top of something if you do not, in fact, want to be fired. But life does not work that way. 

Swaddled in the comfort of grad school, back then I was mostly ignorant of adult life, even though I was nearly thirty. Lots of people retain this ignorance even outside of comfortable environments via a series of mental calisthenics that have to be seen to be believed (you will usually only get to see them in your immediate family members, closest friends, or people you’re casually dating). The mental calisthenics are necessary because we all know failure is very possible. The presence of the mental calisthenics reveals the existence of the thing they are put there to deny. 

You always hear whispers of this stuff, of course. Even in grad school you see some people self-sabotage like this, but it’s so scary, and nobody wants to talk about it, so it feels like it’s not that common. And once you get to the end of grad school, you want to believe that grad school was the major challenge and you did it and you’re done. (The hope that whatever we’re currently grappling with might somehow be the “last big challenge” we have to face in life is another kind of almost adorably stupid belief that I personally am consistently subject to and seem to be unable to eradicate.) 

So I guess in general you’re like — or I was like — well come on, think about it. Not submitting your papers? Could this really happen to people? With an unearned confidence about the world usually exhibited only by McKinsey interns and real-estate agents, I kind of thought it didn’t. And then, over the course of the following five years, I watched the simple refusal to submit their own papers ruin people’s lives. There are many things that an academic career can come back from. Not submitting your work is not one of them.

***

It’s not about how smart someone is. The behaviour is stupid, no question, but the people in question can be almost appallingly smart. I think some of the smartest people I’ve ever met  — and I’ve met some — have been nerfed like this by their own minds, or their anxiety, or whatever it is. Or if and when they have not been fully nerfed, they’ve got close to it. It’s bizarre and troubling to watch. Especially if you think that in general, in life, being smart could save you. Believe me, it doesn’t. 

This is also not about moral courage or discernment. I’ve met some spineless, gutless weasels who submitted their papers. Bad people certainly flourish and thrive, good people stumble and fall. It’s hard to accept this. In fact it’s so hard to eradicate this suspicion that somehow success is correlated with virtue that sometimes it feels like we keep trying to reconceptualise both success and virtue to make that correlation work. But so far we haven’t been able to do it. It’s just not there, it’s not real. Reasoning backwards from the outcome — where a good outcome makes you somehow a good person and you’ll redefine “good” until you feel like you can believe that — is another kind of pervasive sickness that nerfs you in another way. 

But nor is this tendency simply a matter of who has worse mental illness, I think. I guess. Or the best therapist. I’m not sure. Therapy should be attempted for this problem, but it doesn’t always work. I guess I don’t know what combination of things leads someone to get totally smoked by this, versus not. But I do know it’s far more common than I could have imagined. Failing because you took a series of actions that would inevitably produce failure is a surprisingly common feature of adult life.

If this tendency nerfs you in your personal life rather than in your professional life, that too is unrelated to how good and kind and compassionate and lovely you are. You can see this pretty broadly in the culture. People who want to be in relationships but refuse to do online dating or speed dating or join a book club or give their number to a stranger in a bar. That’s self-sabotage. Or how about people who want a loving, emotionally available partner but marry a workaholic or some other kind of avoidant personality. Or they do find that relationship, but they cheat on the person, or are so unkind and unloving that the person leaves. There are parents who want their kids to call them, but say cutting or judgmental or overbearing things when they do. Lonely people who want closer friendships, but who don’t text the friends they have; or they text them, but they don’t tell them the truth about their lives or show them who they are. All of this is sabotage. It’s everywhere. We like to hear stories where this is the middle. In real life, there are stories where this is the end. 

***

I did have a prolonged brush with this professionally, actually, about the job market paper. It was on the second round of an R&R, and I was complaining to a friend about how I had so much to do on the revision, and it was this and that, so many tasks, referees are awful, and taking so much time and dragging out, and I did not know which or how many of the tasks to do, and so on and so on, until she said: Forgive me for saying so, but this sounds like avoidance. 

Immediately it was clear that she was right, though I did not want to admit it. When I got over myself and tried to understand my procrastination, I realised it was happening because I could not think about failure. I wasn’t afraid of failure, per se — I couldn’t even get far enough into considering it to be afraid of it. I simply did not accept it as an option. And my brain would not let me attempt a task it knew I very well could fail, if failure was not an option.

Maybe the above just sounds like I was afraid, just so afraid that I couldn’t even consider the outcome I feared. But I don’t think it’s the same. Or I don’t know. If this is a variant of fear, then I think it is a kind of ur-terror that comes before fear — not in the sense of like the ancient gravity of the emotions, but in the sense of the hierarchy of cognition and processing. (Please believe me that I know how ridiculous it sounds to invoke this in the context of journal rejection, but we don’t get to choose what we get mind-blanked about.) What was happening there wasn’t cowardice, it was something that occurs before there is bravery or cowardice. It was more primary, more elemental. The mental structure I had built was just missing pieces. My brain looked for what would happen in the case of failure, and there was nothing there.

At this point in my relationship with myself I think I have learned that what your mind draws blanks about is extremely important. If you try to direct your mind to consider something and it says “No”, that is a huge amount of information, basically a neon sign that says you have terrible unfinished business. If there is any good use of will-power in this world, it is to push through that, and get your mind to dwell on the unthinkable for just a moment.

 Another important clue for me was that at the intellectual or material level the experience made no sense at all. This should have been a clear signal that it was emotionally important. Like, I could (and can!) think about failing out of academia without experiencing too much fear — I didn’t like it or want it, but I could handle the idea. And I could have accepted the failure or journal rejection under other conditions, as I had certainly been rejected before. But to have made no progress and got nowhere after two extensive rounds of revision (each of which took about 8 months) filled me with the kind of blankness that is more restricting than terror. I could not go near the idea.¹

 I think on reflection what I was afraid of was that such a setback, to fail after two rounds, would demoralise me. And I did not want to meet myself demoralised. I prefer to experience myself as broadly enthusiastic, or at least energetic. I did not want to know myself in that other way. (Cleanup for Dr Jung on aisle 5.) 

 The routine theory you hear about self sabotage is that it gives us the illusion of control. I don’t think that’s right: it gives us the reality of control. It is possible to have control in life, in the sense that it is possible to guarantee your own unhappiness. And that can be safe — if unhappiness is familiar, and even in some ways preferable, to encountering a version of yourself that scares you. The versions of ourselves we will not tolerate are powerful. I think that self-sabotage is often activated purely to retain control over whether we encounter them. But then again, we don’t often choose when it’s activated. So maybe the control it offers is an illusion after all. 

Anyway. I think I got sidetracked. My point is that this colleagues’ advice² helped me tremendously and now I’d like to pass it on. The bottleneck for success and fulfilment and even personal growth probably doesn’t look like what we think it looks like. It probably looks more like finishing your projects. Or at least understanding why you don’t want to finish them. And if you’re avoiding something, there’s a part of you that doesn’t want to do it. You need to be in dialogue with it, no matter how much it horrifies you, or how thoroughly you’ve buried that part. Enough already. Now I’m rambling because I’m insecure about the blog post. You have to press send. Finish your projects.

1. This was a couple years ago. At the time, I resolved the issue by forcing my mind to make a plan for what we would do in the case of failure (this took 5 minutes, it looks like “submit to another journal”). But actually I never reflected further on it until now, until writing this made me reconsider what was really behind that blank mental entry where acceptance of failure should have been.

2. You can try to guess who this person was, but I am not going to tell you. People will be deterred from giving their best and most controversial advice to me if they know I will put them on blast in a newsletter.