Staying motivated part 2

A kinda sorta mid career post

Hello darlings!

How the hell is everyone doing? I hope you are kicking ass and taking names on the daily.

A while ago, I asked you to fill out a little survey about MHAWS and literally 5% of you took it. Thanks 5%! (I’m not bitter) (yes I am).

One question I asked was: What should I write about next?

One common response was: How do I stay motivated? Especially how do we stay motivated to produce research after tenure, after a book, after a baby, after a pandemic? (yes, I know it isn’t over) How do we plug on after an enormous failure, a public embarrassment, a deeply wounding rejection, a tenure denial? What keeps you going when you hate your colleagues, your institution, your state, your research, your students, your coauthors, your decisions?

To start: I don’t know. I don’t know why I stay motivated. As always, all my advice works for me and it may or may not work for you. But only an asshole would sign up for an advice newsletter and then get mad when it comes with some advice. (It’s me, I’m the asshole)

Know that motivation should ebb and flow.

At a former institution, there was a “Getting promoted to full” workshop held every year. 8am! FREE BREAKFAST. WOW. And all the tenured folks piled in there to hear earth shattering advice like “keep publishing.” One dean gave the advice that if your time before tenure was “on a treadmill,” your time from tenure to promotion to full should look like “a treadmill on the incline.” What fucking bullshit. No, it shouldn’t! Our lives are difficult and complex and the demands on our time increase after tenure when all of a sudden we get absolutely drenched with service. And it’s new service! High stakes service! Service where people are watching you to see if you do a good job at it!

So fuck that treadmill energy and know that you should have moments where you have more time for research and other points where you have a lot of enthusiasm for some service thing or some teaching and it is okay if they ebb and flow, particularly if you are making sure that these things don’t take up more than 100% of your time. BUT you can work to find the time, motivation, and opportunities to engage in more work.

Maybe the ebb and flow means doing something NEW with your research like writing a book! (Here’s how I went about changing to writing books. And if you need help writing a book, I’d highly recommend Kelly Clancy’s “let’s write books” group!). Maybe it means new coauthors. New ideas. New methods. New communities. Maybe it means taking an administrative role! Or a position with lots of student interaction! The ebbs are totally fine.

BUT make sure that you are actually making choices about these ebbs and flows and not just opting into a lot of service and then going “well, whoops I guess I don’t have any time for research AGAIN”

If that is you, set up some fucking guardrails to get your shit together. I have a deep natural inclination to read novels and fuck around on the internet all day. I can’t wait to retire so I can read the newspaper until 10am and walk my dogs for hours on end. But I don’t do those things because I have a fucking job. AND because I’ve created a wide set of guardrails in my life that push me towards writing and research EVEN WHEN I DON’T WANNA. Understanding what drives you will also help you figure out how to stay motivated. If you are someone who was highly motivated by tenure because you respond really well to external incentives and then when those incentives disappear, so did your motivation, find some new external incentives. Sign up for some conferences. Join a writing group. Make a punch bowl list and get to taking those folks down (I had a MAJOR win against a nemesis this year and it is SO motivating).

Decide what you want out of this job.

(like, really). This job can be a lot of different kinds of jobs and the beauty and horror of it is that we get to pick! We get to pick if we write books or articles, if we largely work alone or with other people, if we do more administration or less, how we teach, how we mentor, how we interact with colleagues, how we serve our departments, schools, disciplines, communities.

But if we don’t make choices, other people will make choices for us. Paul Musgrave has this great piece about what an academic job actually is that outlines a lot of the choices we make (and non-choices). But rarely to we ask ourselves what we actually want out of this.

So what do you actually want out of this job?

After I got tenure and I was particularly miserable with a week of a lot of meetings for shit that clearly didn’t matter, I sat down and wrote out a list of things that I liked about this job and things that I did not like about this job. Here’s that list:

Alt text: A handwritten page of “Likes” and “Dislikes.” Likes include: being smarmy on the internet, researching cool ideas, smart coauthors, new ideas, TRAVEL, dinners w smart women, publishing, workshops, insider knowhow, helping people w hidden curriculum, change, mentoring, the perfect lecture, the perfect discussion. Dislikes include: meetings without food, mansplaining, managing people, sexual harassers, death threats, the patriarchy, elitism, admin, racism, MEETINGS, deadwood, asshole admin.

And then I thought very carefully: how do I make this life one where I do MORE of what I like and LESS of what I dislike? What’s the formula for more travel, more workshops, more dinners with my smart and fabulous friends? How do I start saying no to shit I hate? For every opportunity, thing, task, obligation that I was offered, I thought: is this more of what I like or what I dislike? And I made a commitment to myself that every day would have something that I liked in it. Even if that was just 15 minutes of researching cool ideas. I also started saying no to things that were clear opportunities (like talking to the press about particularly topics) because they came with shit I hated (getting death threats). I also said yes to burdensome service tasks because they let me engage in work to reduce the shit I hate.

So: What do you like about this job? What do you dislike? And how can you fall wildly in love with the life you lead? What are you going to do with this one wild and precious life? Make some fucking choices about your life and run towards the good.

Know also that this list can change! My list would be different today because I have a different job (a much better one! One where I do a lot more of what I love!) and it will be different again in 8 more years. (please).

Recognize that you don’t really like to do research and lean into other things.

This might the most bitter pill the swallow but: many of you don’t actually like writing and research. You only experience the negatives of it without the positives. You forced yourself to barely produce a dissertation and then barely produce enough work to get tenure. Cool. Good news – you don’t have to do a lot of it for the rest of your life. But can I ask that you don’t be fucking deadwood? Like, do the service that sucks because it is time consuming because you don’t have anything else to do with your time? Teach students well. Grade your papers. Be a fucking adult.

Sometimes people seem to think you need to be wildly in love with all parts of your job. That’s some neoliberal bullshit. This is a job. They pay you to do this because you would not do it if they did not pay you. It is okay if people hate parts of their job. Make a plan – what will it take for you to be less miserable? What will it take to do less of the shit you hate and more of what you enjoy. And if you cannot think of anything that you enjoy about this job, go to therapy or get a different job or probably both.

XOXOX

Mirya