How can I get over self-comparatively dismissing tasks?
May 6, 2012 9:26 AM Subscribe
I cannot seem to make progress in my research because I always end up feeling my colleagues would do a much better job. How can I get over this?
I have a very bad pattern in which I will pick up a task to do research (I'm in a practical applied science), start to work on it, get some way and then think thoughts along the lines of "oh, X would probably do a better job of this" or "well I'm certainly not going to be able to find as an elegant solution as Y", which will lead me to immediately dismissing the task. This carries on to reading literature as well, I find I don't do it because I feel I won't get as much out of it as my colleagues.
All in all it leads to a spiral in self-confidence and restarting work randomly, making little tangible progress. I need to break out of this cycle but as far as I can remember I've done this. Which has led me to being pigeon-holed as the kind of person who can solve specific problems in a task but has a poor record of solving tasks independently.
It has become clear to me that if I want to succeed in my career I need to be able to do this independent research, I need some help breaking out of this self-deprecating cycle. Ideally, I'd like to be able to put on blinkers and do my own work and fathom my own progress without letting my brain bombard me about others. I'm looking for help/advice from other people in the community who've had to fight similar issues as to how to begin this journey.
Thanks
I have a very bad pattern in which I will pick up a task to do research (I'm in a practical applied science), start to work on it, get some way and then think thoughts along the lines of "oh, X would probably do a better job of this" or "well I'm certainly not going to be able to find as an elegant solution as Y", which will lead me to immediately dismissing the task. This carries on to reading literature as well, I find I don't do it because I feel I won't get as much out of it as my colleagues.
All in all it leads to a spiral in self-confidence and restarting work randomly, making little tangible progress. I need to break out of this cycle but as far as I can remember I've done this. Which has led me to being pigeon-holed as the kind of person who can solve specific problems in a task but has a poor record of solving tasks independently.
It has become clear to me that if I want to succeed in my career I need to be able to do this independent research, I need some help breaking out of this self-deprecating cycle. Ideally, I'd like to be able to put on blinkers and do my own work and fathom my own progress without letting my brain bombard me about others. I'm looking for help/advice from other people in the community who've had to fight similar issues as to how to begin this journey.
Thanks
Welcome to impostor syndrome. You are very much not alone, a huge percentage of people get it (especially but not only women). do some googling on overcoming it.
posted by brainmouse at 10:11 AM on May 6, 2012 [4 favorites]
posted by brainmouse at 10:11 AM on May 6, 2012 [4 favorites]
I got a consulting job once where I realized that while I was probably not the most qualified person in the world for the position, I was the most qualified person within arm's reach for the company who was available right now.
In research, it is true that there may well be somebody who's better at the task, but those people aren't working on that task or that problem-- you are. And certainly some people might look at your work and say, "I could have done it better," but there's no other reply to that other than, "well you didn't do it, did you? But I did."
Ok, that's the pep talk. More realistically, the problem is that you're procrastinating and easily distracted-- it is actually less important WHY you are doing it than the fact that you are doing it. I honestly don't think you would get more work done of you were less self deprecating about it. Likely you would find some other reason to avoid the work. nickrussell is giving good advice here, and one of the side benefits is that it plays to your talents of focusing on specific individual tasks and solving them rather than getting distracted about how to properly approach the big picture.
posted by deanc at 10:58 AM on May 6, 2012 [1 favorite]
In research, it is true that there may well be somebody who's better at the task, but those people aren't working on that task or that problem-- you are. And certainly some people might look at your work and say, "I could have done it better," but there's no other reply to that other than, "well you didn't do it, did you? But I did."
Ok, that's the pep talk. More realistically, the problem is that you're procrastinating and easily distracted-- it is actually less important WHY you are doing it than the fact that you are doing it. I honestly don't think you would get more work done of you were less self deprecating about it. Likely you would find some other reason to avoid the work. nickrussell is giving good advice here, and one of the side benefits is that it plays to your talents of focusing on specific individual tasks and solving them rather than getting distracted about how to properly approach the big picture.
posted by deanc at 10:58 AM on May 6, 2012 [1 favorite]
There are so many tasks that there are plenty for everyone.
posted by Sidhedevil at 11:37 AM on May 6, 2012 [2 favorites]
posted by Sidhedevil at 11:37 AM on May 6, 2012 [2 favorites]
I've honestly made a career out of doing research that would make more sense to have been done by someone else. The thing you don't realise at the time is that these other people aren't going to do them, and this is usually because they're doing other stuff they find interesting but for which they might not be the best person to be doing them. And so on and so on.
You can either worry the whole intellectual system is slightly inefficient, or just roll with it and do the interesting stuff, knowing as nickrussel says, that perfect is the enemy of good enough - which is the best practical research advice you're ever going to get, IMHO.
posted by cromagnon at 12:05 PM on May 6, 2012
You can either worry the whole intellectual system is slightly inefficient, or just roll with it and do the interesting stuff, knowing as nickrussel says, that perfect is the enemy of good enough - which is the best practical research advice you're ever going to get, IMHO.
posted by cromagnon at 12:05 PM on May 6, 2012
Are you a grad student? When I started my PhD program I felt like a total nobody because everyone around me knew so much more in the field. I got my degree about a week ago, and toward the end I've been the person other students come to with questions and discussions, just because I'm now the one who has the most experience.
In the beginning, I made the mistake of losing the big picture and obsessing about one aspect of the work, largely to carve out a niche for myself within the group. I lost a lot of time trying out things that weren't really needed and improving processes that were already good enough.
The best advice I can give is to never forget what the goal is with your task, in your case the paper you want to publish in the end. When you have a specific problem that a colleague would solve in a better way, make a good attempt on your own and then go discuss it with them and try to learn their tricks.
posted by springload at 6:07 PM on May 6, 2012 [1 favorite]
In the beginning, I made the mistake of losing the big picture and obsessing about one aspect of the work, largely to carve out a niche for myself within the group. I lost a lot of time trying out things that weren't really needed and improving processes that were already good enough.
The best advice I can give is to never forget what the goal is with your task, in your case the paper you want to publish in the end. When you have a specific problem that a colleague would solve in a better way, make a good attempt on your own and then go discuss it with them and try to learn their tricks.
posted by springload at 6:07 PM on May 6, 2012 [1 favorite]
I totally agree with the Dx of imposter syndrome, with which I'm intimately familiar. I went though grad school feeling like I was always the dumbest person in the room. (It may even have been true! We could debate about that. But what is indisputable is that even the dumbest person in the room full of smart people can do amazing work.)
I wonder if it might help to remind yourself that the way that your colleagues got good at solving problems is by... solving problems. By doing it over and over again and making a lot of mistakes. If you don't go that process of feeling dumb, feeling like a screw-up, and banging your head against a brick wall (which everybody feels; that's the nature of the process), you never get to the solution.
The way I survived graduate school was by realizing that my job, my day-to-day work was not to solve problems. That was too intimidating. My day-to-day work was to "Make cheese sandwiches,"* i.e. to produce tangible evidence that I was working on the problem. It was to print (or photocopy, often as not in those days) and read papers, and highlight the pieces relevant to my problem. It was to reproduce calculations in those papers by hand or by writing code. It was to make and print out graphs, and to pore over those graphs, marking the relevant features with a pen. It was to paste said graphs into my lab notebook and write a page of explanation about each graph. It was to write out pages of calculations that were relevant to my problem, to choose parameters that simplify it down to something I whose behavior I could predict intuitively and make sure my model gave the same results.
Miraculously (it seemed to me) these small pieces added up to an actual solution of my problem. Not everything I did contributed directly to the solution, of course, and I went off in the wrong direction many, many times, but that was part of exploring the larger landscape of the problem, and valuable in its own way. When I defended my thesis, I still felt like they were letting me go just because I'd been there so long :) but now that I've been out in the real world (okay, well, post-grad-school academia) for a while, I realize I created a valuable new tool, I answered a question that nobody knew the answer to, and I am now able to see new ways to apply that tool. I can independently attack a new dataset, apply my knowledge and tweak my code, and discover new things.
Memail me if you like.
--
*In the movie Real Genius, which is a classic and everyone should watch, an arrogant physics professor who's being pushed for results says, "We're not making cheese sandwiches here... you can't dictate innovation." Which is exactly the wrong way to look at research. You can't just sit around waiting for "innovation" or "inspiration" to strike. You have to come into work every day and make cheese sandwiches.
posted by BrashTech at 8:19 AM on May 7, 2012
I wonder if it might help to remind yourself that the way that your colleagues got good at solving problems is by... solving problems. By doing it over and over again and making a lot of mistakes. If you don't go that process of feeling dumb, feeling like a screw-up, and banging your head against a brick wall (which everybody feels; that's the nature of the process), you never get to the solution.
The way I survived graduate school was by realizing that my job, my day-to-day work was not to solve problems. That was too intimidating. My day-to-day work was to "Make cheese sandwiches,"* i.e. to produce tangible evidence that I was working on the problem. It was to print (or photocopy, often as not in those days) and read papers, and highlight the pieces relevant to my problem. It was to reproduce calculations in those papers by hand or by writing code. It was to make and print out graphs, and to pore over those graphs, marking the relevant features with a pen. It was to paste said graphs into my lab notebook and write a page of explanation about each graph. It was to write out pages of calculations that were relevant to my problem, to choose parameters that simplify it down to something I whose behavior I could predict intuitively and make sure my model gave the same results.
Miraculously (it seemed to me) these small pieces added up to an actual solution of my problem. Not everything I did contributed directly to the solution, of course, and I went off in the wrong direction many, many times, but that was part of exploring the larger landscape of the problem, and valuable in its own way. When I defended my thesis, I still felt like they were letting me go just because I'd been there so long :) but now that I've been out in the real world (okay, well, post-grad-school academia) for a while, I realize I created a valuable new tool, I answered a question that nobody knew the answer to, and I am now able to see new ways to apply that tool. I can independently attack a new dataset, apply my knowledge and tweak my code, and discover new things.
Memail me if you like.
--
*In the movie Real Genius, which is a classic and everyone should watch, an arrogant physics professor who's being pushed for results says, "We're not making cheese sandwiches here... you can't dictate innovation." Which is exactly the wrong way to look at research. You can't just sit around waiting for "innovation" or "inspiration" to strike. You have to come into work every day and make cheese sandwiches.
posted by BrashTech at 8:19 AM on May 7, 2012
This thread is closed to new comments.
What's interesting about your case as described are opposing drivers. You start by saying that your results will not be as good as someone else's, but then shift to literature, where you won't get as much out of it. So not only do you feel your results will be inferior, but also you feel that your capability for understanding is generally less developed. The latter problem seems to be the primary issue, as the latter probably creates the former.
In terms of your process, if your self-perception is that you are less capable, your behaviour appears to lack discipline. If you felt less capable but had immense discipline, you would generate finished work you despised. If you felt more capable, but lacked discipline, the results might look very much the same.
Thinking through this, I would guess that you are misallocating your problem to inferiority, when it very well may rest on self-discipline. If you have all the brilliance in the world but cannot finishing something and efficiently communicate it, it's the same as not being brilliant at all. The brightest deep space astronomer in the world will probably not discover a new celestial something or other if they don't spend time pouring over the radio telescope logs.
I think it interesting that you have developed a skill-set which is solving specific problems. You are a piece-meal expert, capable of thinking very well about small pieces of other people's larger research. That almost sounds as if your skill level is better than those around you. Often high-achievers tend to become high-achievers by because of perfectionistic tendencies.
I have a friend that is constantly frustrated because he has always compared himself with Einstein. He thinks he has that level of potential, but wastes it. Consequently, his work is always overdone. He thinks it's without a doubt poor, when in reality, it is wonderful, wonderful work. What is not wonderful is the amount of time it takes him to get it done. He's always late, often exhausted, and usually grumpy.
So it sounds like you need to learn a bit of self-discipline. The easiest way to do this in my experience is to chunk-down tasks. I was doing a project a few years ago, and there were five broad areas to be covered. I just couldn't get started. I didn't know how to attack the starting point, everything I did felt useless and irrelevant. I felt as if someone had already done a lot it, thus I was wasting my time.
So I broke it down in about fifteen subtasks. I managed to sort out a few of them but still did not feel flow or quality coming across. So I broke it down again. And again. And again. Until I had seventy two individual tasks to complete. Each of those tasks took between thirty minutes (ring an expert for the answer to a specific question) to three hours (develop insights from qualitative research generated from one investigation) to several blocks of three hours (reviewing two sets of financial statements, year by year for the last three years 2 sets x 3 years each = 6 tasks x 3 hours per task = 18 hours.)
Those seventy two steps took me about three weeks, working mornings six days a week. 72 steps / 18 sessions = 4 tasks per session. Thus, I went from five tasks over 18 days (3.6 days per task.) to completing four tasks per day.
This may sound stupid, but it works. I wish I'd started doing this twenty years ago in fact, for it's the only way I work now. It's still easy to handle the big concepts, but so much more pleasant to work on a series of easy tasks. Part of the reason it works, says the neuroscientist, is that your brain actually deals with very simple concepts. Complex tasks become infinitely more difficult to hold in mind because complexity increases so much when variable entities are considered simultaneously. Also, it feels good to complete a task. When I was only completing one task every four days, it felt terrible. As if it was never going to end. I felt lost, and worn out, and angry. Breaking it down, I whipped through tasks, putting something to bed every hour. It felt great. It gave me natural coffee breaks, and at the end of each day, a considerable feeling of success.
Thus, put the inferiority to the side for the moment. Try some self-discipline for a while. If that sounds strange, consider it this way. You do not have enough self-discipline at the moment. So in building your capacity for self-discipline, you will be doing something new. Thus, the quality of your results may suffer. If you feel that or have negative thoughts, remember that you are doing something new. Let the results be whatever they are. For your first task now is NOT to get the best results but to learn self-discipline. Thus, if your results are mediocre but your process is better, THAT is victory.
Good luck!
posted by nickrussell at 10:00 AM on May 6, 2012 [16 favorites]