blog

“We are all individuals!” chants the group, repeating after Brian.

“I’m not!” says a guy, jumping up and down and waving his hands above his head.

—the effects of groupthink distilled into a hilarious 30 second scene from Monty Python.

We all, to a lesser or greater extent, buy into groupthink. If we didn’t, we’d be unable to function within society. Society is based upon certain norms and assumptions arising from our collective agreements about reality.

For example, groupthink tells us that a red traffic light means stop and green means go. If someone were to come along and say, hey, I think red should mean GO — and started behaving that way — severe mayhem would ensue for both that individual and anyone else around him.

But therein lies the trap: while we must rely on groupthink to survive and thrive in the world, it becomes easy to fall prey to any kind of groupthink, whether helpful or harmful. When we stop questioning fundamental assumptions, those assumptions blend into the fabric of our lives, shaping how we function, our level of success, and our enjoyment.

One of those assumptions is that we must work more and harder to get more “success” (whatever that means).

I see it all around — colleagues who put in 80 hour weeks, not just when grant proposals are due, but as a matter of course. And many of those push their lab members to do the same. So much for a social life, or family, or … much of anything, really.

Let’s all be utter slaves to our science jobs, shall we? Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention the bonus: we get to do all this hard work for lower pay than we’d get in industry. Harder work for lower pay, how much better can it get? How about working for free?

Oh yes, I recently talked to someone who was doing exactly that. Due to tight funding, this person was working for free, using precious salary money to keep people in the lab employed. And they hadn’t taken a vacation (or even long weekend off) in two years.

What the hell? What kind of life is that? Do you think we evolved from primordial ooze just so that we could live miserable, desperate lives? Yes, I know the mantra, life is a b**ch and then you die. That’s a self fulfilling mass delusion if there ever was one.

I know of plenty of people for whom life is decidedly a pleasant experience (because they decided to make it so), though such folks seem to be getting more rarefied in academe.

Analogy time.

I like to whitewater kayak – not on little bitty waves, but over things like waterfalls. I’ve been doing this sport for some ridiculously long number of years.

I’ve taught a lot of people how to run rapids without dying a watery death. Beginners invariably work way too hard at it. And the harder they work, the slower they learn. They sit there and chop at the water with their paddles, wasting energy, and trying to force their way down the river. However, rivers are stubborn, and don’t readily yield to such tough guy (or gal) antics. The experts, on the other hand, are distinguishable from beginners by one thing: they have become highy efficient at using the water to help them get to where they want to go.

They are fluid and graceful, and they do not waste energy unnecessarily. They only put the paddle in the water when and where they know it will yield an optimum result. They do expend energy, but it is generally limited to short bursts at just the right time. In other words, they can run far more difficult rapids than a beginner (and survive), all the while spending less energy doing so. There is no bonus in whitewater paddling for “working harder” at it. In fact, the most enjoyable experiences come from striving for efficiency.

Running a whitewater river is a good metaphor for life. There are calm spots and there are rapids. Some rapids have dangerous obstacles lying in wait, a few of which might even be bad enough to claim your life.  All the while, life keeps flowing forward, whether you decide to go with it or struggle mightily against it.  It does not care about what you do, since you are but a small toy upon the waters.

So the question you might ask yourself is this: do I want to go through life working as hard as I can just because that is some mass delusion I’ve bought into?

I recently met a multimillionare businessman, who is very normal and laid back. His main focus in life (which he reflects on at a fixed time each and every week) is to figure out how to deliver more value to his customers with less effort. That seems like a goal we should all strive for: how can we do higher impact science with less energy, money and effort? Maybe we won’t become millionaires in the process, but who knows, we might cure cancer or something trivial like that.

But instead, the dominant paradigm is pointing the opposite way, and many just follow it without question. The mantra is, let’s see how hard we can make our lives, by submitting as many grant applications into the lottery as possible (hence lowering the odds for everyone), working to exhaustion, alienating our lab staff, alienating our families, and neglecting our health. Let’s live a miserable life in the name of science. Honestly: science does not care whether you are miserable or not. And being miserable does not make you more likely to come upon that world-changing discovery!

I’m going to challenge you by asking a question: Do you want to become an efficient expert at life, learning how to do what you do more efficiently and with less stress, or are you going to remain a beginner who struggles through by sheer brute force, until the heavy water of life crushes you?

And, no, I’m not talking about just getting better at organizing your to-do list here. I’m talking about learning how to cross at least half (if not more) of the irrelevant things off your to-do list, without ever having done them. Or better yet, to avoid ever putting those irrelevant things on the list in the first place (because having them there will drain your precious mental energy).

In other words, the goal is to learn how to do only those things which will yield an optimal result, like the expert whitewater paddler, who wields optimal control with minimum effort.  Make this one shift in your mental game, and life can be a very different place.  But it will not be easy, because you will have to be that lone individual who stands up and says “I’m not!” in the face of an enormous crowd who will keep banging and thrashing about, working as hard as they can and getting very little of importance done.

If you’d like a focused strategy session with me to examine how you might apply the principles in your own grant writing endeavors (so that you’re not just wasting time playing the lottery), you can apply here (https://grantfoundry.com/GrantStrategypt1.html), and we’ll let you know if you’re selected.