Last week someone shared a saying with me: Always remember
why you are doing something. Naturally, my first thought was “Well, yes, of
course, how could you forget?” But throughout that week I realized I had forgotten.
I am lucky enough that I have a job that is the best job I could imagine for myself. Already as a kid I could lose myself in just observing a couple of jackdaws sitting on the fence outside, tadpoles organising themselves around a piece of bread or a spider restructuring her web after morning rain. Now I get to study nature. I get to wonder, marvel and story-tell about nature. But as with almost any job, it comes for a price.
If you want to continue in science than you have to be good in science. Or better said: people have to be convinced that you are good in science. But there is basically only one measure people have for this. Publications. And the best and almost only way to get good publications is to have a strong story combined with cool (significant) results. Unfortunately, getting cool results relies for a large part on luck and, with field biology at least, for an even larger part on the absence of bad luck.
I am lucky enough that I have a job that is the best job I could imagine for myself. Already as a kid I could lose myself in just observing a couple of jackdaws sitting on the fence outside, tadpoles organising themselves around a piece of bread or a spider restructuring her web after morning rain. Now I get to study nature. I get to wonder, marvel and story-tell about nature. But as with almost any job, it comes for a price.
If you want to continue in science than you have to be good in science. Or better said: people have to be convinced that you are good in science. But there is basically only one measure people have for this. Publications. And the best and almost only way to get good publications is to have a strong story combined with cool (significant) results. Unfortunately, getting cool results relies for a large part on luck and, with field biology at least, for an even larger part on the absence of bad luck.
You can try very hard, but still there can be many pitfalls
on the way. Bad weather might strongly affect your study species, your technology
might fail, your sample size might decrease because of unexpected predation and
if you finally do manage to uncover something cool, someone else might have
just beaten you to it. All very frustrating! Then you start to look around. How
are other people doing? How are you doing compared to others? And that is exactly
when it goes wrong. You start doing things to be better than others. Joy gets
replaced with competitiveness and often followed by a feeling of failure. You
forget the why. And I forgot the why.
Luckily there was the NIOO-open day to remind me again. Last weekend our institute was open for the general public and my colleagues and I got to tell about our work. During these short talks I became to feel enthusiastic again and the reason was because I did not talk about all the things that went wrong, but I talked about all the things that make my study so interesting.
So now I will try to lose myself again. But in a good way. And I will try not to write publications to be better than others, but to write publications to tell stories. To write out of curiosity.
Luckily there was the NIOO-open day to remind me again. Last weekend our institute was open for the general public and my colleagues and I got to tell about our work. During these short talks I became to feel enthusiastic again and the reason was because I did not talk about all the things that went wrong, but I talked about all the things that make my study so interesting.
So now I will try to lose myself again. But in a good way. And I will try not to write publications to be better than others, but to write publications to tell stories. To write out of curiosity.
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