Productivity | Cristina Lozano

Be the imperfect academic

Sat, 31 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Not that long ago, I was having a conversation with someone who didn’t know me well. At some point, I mentioned that I was a perfectionist. He immediately pointed back to an earlier comment I had made about finishing something when it was good enough and, hence, he thought I was not a perfectionist. I can’t blame him, I used to have the same idea about what perfectionism was. I never gave too much thought to the topic until I bumped into this podcast (Perfect Is the Enemy, from Women at Work by the Harvard Business Review).

I used to think about perfectionism as a mixed bag of positive and negative qualities. Think about the cliché response people give during job interviews when asked about weaknesses: “I’m such a perfectionist”. This answer implies that perfectionism is “bad”, a weakness that probably makes you overthink. But at the same time… it is “good”, because, you know, it’s an interview and you have to look good. You say this because you want your potential employer to know that you produce quality work, even better, “perfect work”.

Right from the beginning of the episode, I could see myself reflected in many of the behaviors they describe. Here’s a list of ideas that particularly resonated with me and changed the way I see perfectionism:

Perfectionist tend to dismiss compliments by saying “oh, that’s nothing”
They ruminate a lot about negative feedback and spend too much time avoiding making mistakes
Someone with high standards focuses on the big picture, a perfectionist gets lost in the details
People with impostor syndrome tend to constantly raise their standards and think that high achievement is the only way to escape disaster.
Some smart kids learn that high achievement gives them social acceptance

Even if this doesn’t apply to you, chances are that it does apply to someone you work with or interact with regularly, and it’s a good idea to be aware of the process of thinking. Perfectionism, although suffered by both men and women, affects women more. Research shows that when women make mistakes, they are remembered for longer and are judged more harshly. This leads women to believe they need to be perfect to succeed. Because they cannot be perfect at everything, they develop impostor syndrome. I liked how in the podcast, they defined impostor syndrome as a reaction to sexism, and acknowledging this fact gives us power about how to react.

“Perfectionism is not a virtue, but a form of self-sabotage. If we try to be perfect, we just get on our own way. We ruminate over small mistakes and never take risks on conversations” Dr. Alice Boyes

I experience perfectionism both in my personal and professional life. I remember a few years ago when preparing dinner with my boyfriend at the time, he would try to be nice and invite his roommates to join us for dinner. I would see that there was enough food for a nice meal for two people, but it would not be enough for four people. Notice how I said a “nice meal”. He just wanted to spend a nice evening with them (which is what would happen). However, I would experience it as “they are going to be hungry”, “this is not a decent meal”. The truth is that nobody was hungry and nobody was thinking the meal was indecent, it was just all in my head. My head tends to think that if I have someone over for dinner, I need to prepare a three-course banquet with a butler (usually me being the butler). The catch point here is that, would I have been left to my own devices, those meals would not have happened, because they were not perfect. And here is where it gets dangerous and what I’ve been thinking a lot about. How many things have I missed because they were not perfect according to unrealistic expectations created in my head?

Moving to work, you have no idea how painful writing articles is for me. It is a draining experience that leaves me exhausted and makes me want to run away. Among the thoughts that cross my mind are: you are lazy, you just procrastinate all the time, this is mediocre, etc. Being realistic, I am a junior researcher, doing junior things, right? I should probably get that tattooed on my forehead because, when I’m writing, my head thinks that I should write as if I had been doing it for 20 years. Of course, compared to that imaginary noble laureate researcher, what I produce is 💩. The process is so painful, that I just reject the idea altogether and prefer not to do it. But then I go to conferences and I see that what I’m producing is not that bad at all and, actually, people find it interesting.

I first listened to this podcast in October 2020 and I’ve listened to it again a couple more times. Now that I’m forcing myself to write this blog, I realize that I have started taking some steps to try to keep perfectionist-Cristina at bay. One important takeaway is that you cannot wait for your thoughts to change your behavior. You do it the other around: you use your behavior to change your thoughts. I now serve indecent meals when I have friends over, I’m going to start a crappy research project this summer, and I will start making crappy youtube videos about bilingualism 😉.

Do you ever feel like you need permission?

Sat, 31 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When you were a kid, were you the good kid that always asked for permission to do things? This is what we are taught. In a class, if you need to go to the restroom, you raise your hand, and the teacher decides whether you can go. You are rewarded for this behavior. This is great to keep things under control. The problem comes when you subconsciously get stuck with that behavior for the rest of your life. To me, this came in the shape of: “oh, it would be great if someone would…” And then I would proceed to say something that I am perfectly capable of doing, but because it hasn’t been done yet, I don’t even consider that I could be the one doing it. I was mentally raising my hand, but nobody around me was there to give me permission.

In a recent Facebook post, I mentioned I had just created a lab. A colleague, who’s a brilliant researcher a few years ahead of me in the academia game, mentioned she was jealous of me having a lab. I haven’t talked to her about why she doesn’t have one, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was because of that feeling of needing to ask for permission. If you are now thinking that I have an illegal secret lab, don’t worry, I did talk to my department’s chair about it. At first, he was suspicious of me asking for space (you know, we’re in NYC, space is not in abundance), but after I told him I wasn’t going to ask for anything from him, he was happy as a clam: “yes, go ahead, sounds great”. I am in a modern language department and I am the only experimental researcher. Labs are not a tradition here and nobody had a lab before. But I had worked with undergraduate students while doing my Ph.D. and I liked the idea of working with a group of motivated students. We should be more comfortable with the idea of doing things differently.

I started this blog by telling you why you should practice asking for more. I feel both ideas are linked. It all boils down to making your needs met and your voice heard. When you ask for more, you want to optimize your conditions (to work better, to enjoy your dinner by being in a better location, etc.). And when you decide to go ahead with an innovative project, you’re setting yourself apart and leading towards change. And change is indispensable for improvement.

You might be wondering (I certainly was), how did Cristina get to this idea? Multiple factors have brought me here. First, going to therapy for a couple of years made me realize that not getting my needs met and feeling that I needed permission was a pattern for me (and I suspect many fellow females are on the same boat). This is like AA, you need to recognize your problem first. Second, seeing other people doing things they were not great at, but enjoying the process anyway. Some of the YouTubers I started following would be proud of their improvement in their new hobby and it got me thinking: “wait a minute, I used to be better than that, and I stopped because I thought I wasn’t good enough” (remember perfectionism?). And third, seeing how one of my friends doesn’t get stopped by mental obstacles. If he gets an idea of something cool, he finds a way of getting it. Importantly, he dreams big. He thought of celebrating his girlfriend’s 30th birthday on a boat in the Virgin Islands and…we found a way of doing it (all within a grad student budget).

What do I mean by mental obstacles? It’s the believes you hold onto that stop you from doing what you really want. I’ll give you an example. When I was 18, I got introduced to sailing. I worked as an au-pair in Ireland for a family that had a sailing boat. Part of my job was taking care of the kids while the family was on vacation in the boat. I thought I would be scared of sailing, but, to my surprise, I loved it. When I came back home, my environment repeated the idea that “sailing was for rich people”. I wasn’t rich, so it wasn’t for me. This was the mental obstacle that was stopping me from doing something I fell in love with. Long story short, thanks to my friend, I went on a few sailing trips and… I was able to see the mental obstacle. None of us were close to rich and we were doing it anyway. I did some research and, a month ago, I joined a sailing club. I already have the basic keelboat certification and love seeing NYC’s skyline from the Hudson river every week ⛵

Now, think about all the things, work or personal, that you find yourself saying: “it would be cool if…” Why aren’t you doing them? What if you just focus on figuring out how to do them? Make sure you tell me so I get more ideas! 😉

Should researchers be more like youtubers?

Sat, 31 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I feel like I’m a slow researcher. I read slow, I write slow, I review my writing slow, you get the idea. I should probably start the “slow research movement.” For a while, I turned to academic “media” to see whether this was normal. I am a regular consumer of The Chronicle of Higher Education, podcasts such as The Effort Report and AcaDames, and whatever The Professor is In is doing on social media. I also read books like How to write a lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing or The Writing Workshop: Write More, Write Better, Be Happier in Academia (which I highly recommend, and it’s free!). It turns out that I’m normal, but the question still lingers in my mind.

Recently, I’ve found myself looking at other outlets beyond academia. In particular, I’ve started following some content creators on YouTube. I got here because, around a year ago, my brother told me that he watches YouTube. He doesn’t watch Netflix, he watches Youtube, and apparently, this is something younger people do. I also wanted to be a cool kid and I started watching a few YouTube channels he pointed out.

One of the channels was JackConteExtras. Jack Conte is a musician and the founder of Patreon, a platform connecting content creators with their followers. He uses this channel to talk about his creative process. This video stood out to me because of the parallelisms between his music creation process and our research process.

He tells the story about how he obsessively worked on getting the kick drum in one of his songs to make it “bright enough.” Days working in his study to fix a minute detail. Does it sound familiar? Replace “kick drum” with “research question” or “discussion paragraph” and you are describing where many researchers get stuck. Importantly, Jack noticed that he had a problem. Jack and I found out that we have the same problem.

He attributes this issue to the impossibility of finding an end to the creative process. If you are playing soccer, it’s easy to find the end. There is a big-timer visible at all times and rules in case of a tie. Finishing a game feels like an end. However, finishing a song for him, a paper for us, feels nothing like an end. Jack makes this distinction between working to publish and working for pleasure.

This explanation seems pretty logical: either you focus on getting things “out there” or you focus on “having fun”. But this is not how it feels to me. I’ve come to understand that, for me, getting stuck is linked to perfectionism, and this could not be any further pleasure. But I’ll talk about perfectionism another day.

What do we do about it? If you haven’t noticed yet, I’m very pragmatic and like to jump into solutions and results. It turns out that many things don’t work like that. After a couple of years of therapy and meditation, I’m still working on figuring out how perfectionism has hampered my progress. Nonetheless, I do believe there are a few practical takeaways from Jack’s video.

“Publishing is a style of work, an attitude that persists over the creative process”

He defines publishing as the process of “deciding to stop when you want to keep going, and it is painful”. Importantly, he notices that people who produce massive amounts of content, do so because they don’t “finish” things, they “publish” them. This is an idea that I’ve encountered in other places like this interview with Seth Godin. He explains that he just writes a blog post every day, without questioning whether it is good enough, he just writes it. In the words of Jack, “Your whole mentality shifts when you work to publish”.

“Do only what matters and then stop”

This is probably the trickiest part. How can we draw the line between obsessing about a paper and making sure it is good quality? I probably have more questions than answers, but I sense that the key is 1. committing to publishing as a style of work, and 2. being clear about the goal. Thinking about our main objective will help us not lose sight of what we want to accomplish. For instance, when writing a paper, have we made sure our conclusions are contributions to the field are clear? If yes, then maybe spending 5 hours tinkering with the graphs on R to make them crisper is not worth it.

“The world is made of funnels”

The basic idea behind the funnel theory is that we need to create a lot and eventually some of it will be successful. We tend to admire people who produce high-quality work and assume they just do great stuff. What we fail to see is that they often do a lot of stuff and some of it happens to be great. This is true for singers, painters, movie directors, and researchers too! The video mentions that we cannot choose what we are famous for. I initially thought that this is a point where music and research differ, because of the “high standards” research demands. You cannot submit for publication the first random research idea that crosses your mind because it will get rejected. But the more I think about it, the more I realize research is not different. Senior researchers say that their most cited paper is often not the one they would have thought of or the one they spent more time on.

Whenever I come up with a potential research idea, my brain immediately finds all the reasons why I should not do it (I don’t know enough about it, it’s not good enough, nobody will care about it, why am I even here?). I’ve been thinking a lot about how this thinking pattern has been a form of self-sabotage. This blog an attempt to break out of that pattern 🤭 Let me know if you have experienced anything similar and we can have our mini-therapy club. In the meantime, remember what Jack told us: “you cannot choose what you are famous for” but you can choose to be “prolific, creative, create great stuff and work to publish”.

What if being nervous wasn't that bad?

Sat, 31 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Do you remember the first time you presented at a conference? I certainly do. I remember I was a train wreck right before my presentation and all I could think of was: why did I sign up for this? It’s not worth it. I was hating my adviser at the time, who had encouraged me to go and present (she’s great, by the way). Even if you haven’t presented at a conference, I’m sure you can relate to this experience. Something important is coming up and you become the most anxious person in a 100 miles radius. Everyone is going to face this situation at some point in life, why aren’t we taught about how to handle it? Wouldn’t it be useful to know how to handle yourself when this situation comes? I’ll share with you what I’ve learned about managing your difficult moments.

We need to start by understanding why we get nervous in the first place. The cause is simple: fear. Fear of failing miserably or not being good enough, not making a good decision, etc. We think we have control, but when your body senses fear, a more subconscious part of your brain takes over and tries to get you out of that situation (in my case at the conference, I wanted to run away and never sign up to present again). Your brain reacts the same way as if a mammoth was chasing you. And this is what you need to understand: your brain is doing its job, trying to protect you. The problem is that the consequences are not the same. What happens if you bomb your conference presentation? Not much, people might feel sorry for you, and then…they’ll forget (unless you are on the job market, then you might have some consequences).

Now that we understand why nervousness happens to us, let’s think about the opposite, what’s the complete opposite of being nervous? Being arrogant. Imagine that you’re interviewing people for a job hierarchically below you. Who would you rather have? Someone who is visibly nervous (but manages to give you good answers)? Or someone so confident they think they can be your boss? Reflecting on these situations gives us the power necessary to not let fear control us. Obviously, if you are so nervous you cannot even articulate an answer, that’s not good either. My point is that being nervous is not that bad. I came across this idea in the book Storyworthy, by Matthew Dicks. He says the following about his more seasoned performer friend Steve:

“When Steve [more experienced storyteller] performs, he is nervous. Backstage, he paces and mumbles to himself. Onstage, he is jittery and uncertain for the first few moments of his story, despite his honest-to-goodness greatness. His nervousness serves him well. Audiences love Steve before he even says a word. […] Steve connects with the audience before he even speaks because, through his nervousness, he shows them that he is just like them. They are rooting for him before he ever says a word.”

Then he goes on to explain how he (Matt, the author) used to perform on stage:

“I stand there like a jerk. I’m not worried at all. If the audience doesn’t like me, I act as if it’s their own damn fault. Steve is right. I had better tell a great story, because I give the audience nothing to love as I stand before them. I’m an overly confident, probably arrogant.”

Think about the moments when you get nervous. I’m guessing it’s not when you do your usual business. You get nervous when something new or important is about to happen. Humans are not wired for uncertainty and “new” involves uncertainty. So it gets scary and we try to get rid of that scary feeling. But now consider the alternative. If we don’t embark on anything new or important, things won’t get better and that is what we should fear. You might wonder what happened during my first conference presentation. It went well, people liked it and came to ask me for more resources. Actually, a few years later, I ended up winning an award for best student presentation at an international conference. Had I decided to avoid the intense fear of presenting after the first time, I wouldn’t have met wonderful researchers and shared ideas with them.

This sounds pretty, but it’s easier said than done. A bit over a year ago, I was getting ready to do job interviews and the first ones were scary, but the scariest one was the fourth one, the job I currently have. I really wanted that job and I was so nervous before getting on the Skype call, I could barely sit still. I had prepared a lot, spent hours researching the school and each committee member, figured out who would be the “bad” cop, and what they were looking for. But the uncertainty was killing me, is there something I haven’t prepare for? do they want someone with my profile? etc. If I could advise myself back then, I would tell myself to remember that the nervousness is getting me ready, no need to run from it, just an indicator that something important is about to happen. There is no guarantee it will go well, but if you want something better, you need to try something new, and, yes, new involves uncertainty. So next time you (we) feel that fear, remember that something better might come. The fear is just warning you to be ready, to stay alert, and it will help you not to be a jerk.