I went to an internal seminar here at work the other week. It had a title like “Building a Stellar Research Career”. The research development office had invited some senior academics along to talk about how they had managed their careers. While it was nice to hear smart and successful people talk about their work, it was too high-level to be of much use. Most of the advice boiled down to (1) Publish a lot, in the highest quality publications you can get into and (2) apply for a lot of funding so that you eventually get some. Which is lovely, and valuable to hear if you’d not heard it before.
There was also quite a lot of talk about being open to new ideas and working across disciplines and so on. Also, good to hear if you’d not heard it before.
My problem is that I have heard it before. In these sort of seminars I’ve heard too much about attitude and approach and not enough about the day-to-day work of putting that into practice. Seth has his hierarchy of success:
- Attitude
- Approach
- Goals
- Strategy
- Tactics
- Execution
And he exhorts us to look at the top of that hierarchy, to get our attitude and approach right.
I’ve also been to seminars and workshops where we’ve had great help with the actual execution part of work. How to write a great abstract for a journal paper. How to structure a conclusion. And those were awesome. They improved my writing, both for formal publication and for planning presentations.
But eventually, at some level, you have to just sit down and work. But work is really hard. How do you go from great execution, at the level of paragraphs, into tactics, strategy and so on? What I want to hear about is the practices involved doing that work and I want to hear about it in a way that links back to the noble goals of having a great attitude and approach. Using Seth’s hierarchy as the yardstick, I want to know more about the small scale tactics that people use every day.
