Celebrate rejection, celebrate acceptance, and be careful what you ask for

Back in February, after sending a query to a literary agent, I wrote about celebrating rejection.  The agency website says, “If you don’t hear from us in six weeks, assume we’re not interested.” I didn’t hear after six weeks, so I assumed that I had been rejected. After the sixth week passed, I tried to celebrate my rejection. 

And then I began working on a query letter for a publisher (my book is the kind of thing that is at the edge of being mass-market enough for one of the commercial publishing houses—there are several different commercial houses that have related books, and the commercial publishers don’t accept unsolicited queries—if I want to publish at a commercial publisher, I need an agent—but it’s also suitable for academic publisher, who do accept queries from authors). I decided to try a query letter (“would you like to see a proposal for a book” rather than “would you like to see a manuscript of a book”), thinking that a shorter, simpler query might get a quicker response.  I sent my first (and only) query letter to a publisher on the seventh week after sending my previous proposal, preparing to (try to) celebrate rejection yet again.

Celebrating rejection is not the easiest thing. It’s silly to argue that rejection is all good—the central part of rejection is that someone rejected your request, and presumably you didn’t make a request for something you didn’t either want or need (or both).  The possibility of celebrating rejection comes from the complexity of rejection: rejection does force one to consider new opportunities or new avenues of exploration, and those opportunities can be celebrated. It takes effort and focus, but as the saying goes, “if you get lemons, make lemonade.”

This past Monday (eight weeks after sending the proposal), I did, in fact, receive a formal rejection from the agent, which gave me a second opportunity to “celebrate” my rejection. A double helping of rejection to celebrate!

Of course, as I had already sent off a new query letter, my attention and interest were elsewhere, despite the renewed sting of rejection. As it happens, my query letter to the publisher had received a positive response—the acquisitions editor had expressed interest in seeing a proposal and in setting a time to talk with me.

Naturally, I was thrilled that my query had received a positive response. In many ways, celebrating acceptance is much easier than celebrating rejection.

But one does need to be careful what one asks for, because sometimes the request is accepted! Because of the acceptance of the query letter, I spent the last week writing and rewriting a proposal for the publisher. There are elements of book proposals that can be re-used, but different publishers have different interests and different book lists, and that leads to a need for some differences. And once the process of rewriting has started, it can take on its own life, as previous choices come under examination.

Last week, I wrote about compromise and how even when things are going well, you can expect someone to ask you to compromise. And I guess this is in that same vein: things could be going well (by being accepted, for example), and still there is more work to do, there are compromises to make.  I’m pretty darn happy that my query letter received a positive response, but life doesn’t end there. Resting on laurels is rarely possible. I have a next step (a proposal), which could lead to rejection, and then, possibly, a next step (manuscript submission), which could lead to rejection. And if that is accepted, then there are the steps of revising, editing, possibly indexing, promoting, etc.

Since this post is about celebrating things, I’ll wrap by noting that we have some choice over where we direct our attention. And especially, that there are always concerns for looking forward to the future: regardless of whether you were accepted or rejected, you can choose where to direct your attention, and looking at the road ahead, seeing difficulties, one can still choose to focus attention on the positive goals, too. It would be nice to have some laurels to rest upon, even if that rest might be uneasy.

Community, compromise, cooperation and contribution

This is about why I like to pay my taxes.  There are plenty of things about taxes that I don’t like, but on the whole, I like paying them because it’s my contribution to something I believe in.

The United States of America is hardly a perfect nation.  It’s got a problematic history and a problematic present.  Many have been victims of the injustices committed by the US and its representatives.  All the same, the US is something I believe in, particularly the principles espoused in the U.S. Constitution.

My belief in the Constitution is, in fact, so extreme, that I’m inclined to consider people who rail against taxes to be un-American.

These positions stem from understanding the value system espoused by the Constitution.

The preamble to the Constitution makes clear the purposes and the value system being invoked and created:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

What is this saying? Well, the main idea of the sentence is “We’re establishing this constitution to provide certain outcomes that we deem desirable.”  It expresses the values that the government is trying to establish:

1. Union

2. Justice

3. Domestic Tranquility

4. Common Defense

5. General Welfare

and

6. Secure the Blessings of Liberty for current and future generations

Firstly, it should be noted that this is a liberal document in the classic sense of the term “liberal”:  It is concerned with ensuring the liberty of those whom it presumes to govern. It is also “liberal” in the common meaning of “open to change.”  It is distinctly not conservative (i.e., hoping to maintain and establish old forms of government).

Second, it should be noted that it is a fundamentally cooperative document: “We the People,” it says. It is designed to set up a cooperative community: the people are going to work together to achieve the stated aims.  As I have discussed in previous posts, cooperation often includes compromise.  Compromise made to promote some desired value is not a restriction of freedom, as those who rail against taxes often complain, it is a choice to put in the necessary contribution to make the cooperative system work.

For there to be a “perfect union” in which “We the people” work together, there must be people who choose to work together, and that means people choosing to contribute to the common effort, including a willingness to compromise.

The Constitution is not just saying the we think that liberty, justice, etc. are good, it is saying that we—the people working together—are going to accede to a coherent set of rules that will guide (and limit) our actions.  The framers of the Constitution knew that compromise was necessary, and the document sets up a system for negotiating compromises.

The United States is a community. For that community to work, effort and contribution are required. Taxes are one form of contribution.  That people would be happy to take the benefits of living in the US, and would claim to love the United States and its freedoms, and then would rail against paying taxes is, I think, selfish entitlement.  The system only works if we the people contribute to its operation, even when we don’t necessarily like how the system works.

People who live in the US, who talk about how great America is, and who complain that they shouldn’t have to pay taxes, are people who seem to believe that they should get the benefits of living in this cooperative society without making contributions or compromise. Such people, in my opinion, are un-American, and frankly, if they don’t like the way America works, they should move to another country.

To be part of a community working together to reach a goal means making compromises. Taxes are part of the compromise of living in, and benefiting from, the community defined and governed by the Constitution of the United States of America.

I have slightly more sympathy for people who don’t want to pay taxes because they don’t like how their tax dollars are being spent—that, at least, doesn’t represent a repudiation of the basic community and the need to contribute to the community.  But still—compromise is necessary, and paying taxes is a necessary compromise if we, the people of the United States of America, want to do things like establish Justice, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.

I believe in the project and ideals defined in the US Constitution’s preamble and Bill of Rights. I don’t like the compromise made by the original framers that allowed slavery to continue, but that language has been amended. The general project is still worthy, despite the problems. But believing in that project, and trying to realize that project means compromise, including the compromise of paying taxes.  If you consider yourself a patriot of the U.S., you should be willing to make compromises to contribute to the cooperative project that is this nation.

Inevitably, you will be asked to compromise.

You are going to get asked to do things you don't want to do. And you will have to negotiate some compromise. It's difficult, but accepting this inevitability makes it easier to set aside the frustration and focus on what you can accomplish.

When you’re a doctoral candidate, it can be pretty natural to start thinking “once I’m done, I’ll be free; I won’t have to do what my professors tell me any more. I’ll be able to do my work to suit myself.” Feeling adversarial toward your professors is pretty natural, as is feeling resentment for doing things that you don’t want to do. It’s not fun to be forced to write about something that you think off-subject  just to please your professor.  And it is therefore also natural to feel excitement at the prospect of being free of such disagreements with your professors.

The thing is, if it’s not your professors, it’s going to be someone else.  This point was really driven home to me when I was talking with an author who was negotiating with the president of his publisher. The book is deep in process. The author has already edited it down significantly in size to suit the publisher. But recently the publisher asked him to change the title. “People won’t understand it. It won’t sell,” the publisher said.

This author is a tenure-track professor and a department chair, with multiple publications and a book manuscript that got rave reviews from the blind reviewers. But this morning, he had to face someone saying “I want you to do it differently.”

If you show your work to enough people, there is sure to be someone who will ask you to change it.  And even if you’re only working with one person (or one institution), you might well get asked to change it. You are not, after all, the only independent actor with plans and desires and expectations.

I guess the message I’d like to boil this down to is that the need to compromise never goes away if you want to work with other people, so you have to figure out how (and when) to compromise on stuff.

You can do awesome work that many people will love, and you can still find people who will dislike it or want to change it. Are those people wrong?  At times, it becomes necessary to make choices that aren’t entirely palatable: does the author insist on the title, even though it might mean losing the publisher? Does the author, give up the title to satisfy the publisher? Of course, the author could also decide that it’s a good idea to trust the publisher: after all, it would be nice to sell a lot of copies, right? And publishers know something about selling—more about selling than most professors, I would imagine.

I’ve been writing about perfectionism recently, and this is another angle on perfectionism: what one person views as perfect, another might view as problematic. What one person views as excellent, another might view as insufficient. Such differences in perception and evaluation reveal that “perfect” is not, practically speaking, the same as excellent.

When working on a project, it’s natural to focus on your own vision and on making a creation that matches that vision, and lives up to the standards that you set.  It’s super important to be aware of your own standards, and to be able to strive for them.

To the extent that you hope your work will communicate with others—and that’s the purpose of writing—and will get good responses, the question of what is “perfect” is problematized: by which standard is the work evaluated? By your standard? By the standards of the audience? 

It can often feel frustrating and even disempowering when someone asks you to change something you do to satisfy their desires. This is especially true if you don’t agree with their position. But at the same time, that very disagreement is important: to the extent that you dismiss their position, you are frustrating and disempowering them. There are times to hold firm to what you believe—I recommended that the author hold firm on the title—and there are times to think about what the other person is asking from you, and why they want it. Communication and community require compromise. If not yours, then someone else’s. It’s not always fun to compromise, and it’s not always appropriate. But it can be taken for granted that you will be asked and that you will have to negotiate it. For me, at least, understanding that reality helps make it more palatable: this isn’t something that I can change by being smarter or working harder; this is the way it is.

More about perfectionism and tradeoffs

A few days ago, I got an e-mail from a perfectionist who does great work, but...

On 3/__/18 8:17 PM, _______ wrote: 

> Perfectionism is killing me. 

>

> [other job] is, too. But that's sometimes an excuse for perfectionism. 

>

> I’m going to try doing the shittiest job ever of reading and summarizing papers tomorrow morning. 

Hi ______, 

How can you find the balance--the point of tension between competing demands? There's [other job]. There's a dissertation that you've already done a great job on and still have to do more (both in terms of getting the dissertation signed off--which is not exciting--and in the longer run as you think about turning it into a book).  There's new research. There's the rest of your life, like friends and family, and self-indulgence. 

I got a fortune cookie fortune once that said something like "your strengths grow out of your weaknesses," which is a worthy consideration (even if I remember the cookie wrong).  In a way, character traits present a two-edged duality: an ability like your perfectionism both promotes and inhibits your success.  You don't want to set that vision and that drive aside, because that vision and that drive are precisely what allow you to create work of the quality that you produce. At the same time, allowing that vision and that drive too much leeway can drive you into a corner. On the one hand, you want to cultivate that perfectionism and encourage it. On the other, you want to keep it in check. 

Any ability is like that. A person with physical strength can do certain things well, but may also choose strength when physical force isn't the best option. Intelligence answers many situations, but sometimes rational thinking isn't the answer. Any ability suits some situations better than others.  How can you apply you perfectionist powers to best suit this situation? 

I heartily approve of your trying to do a shitty job. 

At the same time, remember that brevity is a virtue. If someone asks you to describe your work in one minute, you give it a try, even if the description you produce is a poor description by many standards. An "elevator pitch" is too short to be a good description of any work, and yet it can sometimes be exactly what is wanted.  A short discussion of literature about faculty roles is not necessarily worse for being brief!  There's a different perfection to seek here: the project manager's perfection, which is getting high quality work done on schedule. 

Finish that draft and perfect your schedule. 

best, 

Dave 

Trade-offs, perfectionism, and self-promotion

Recently, someone posted to my facebook page that they had bought a copy of my dissertation book. I am thrilled whenever anyone buys it, it goes without saying. I worked hard on that book and getting some positive return on my efforts feels good—just hearing that someone likes the idea is nice, for that matter. But there’s also a certain tinge of fear—what if someone doesn’t like it? I worked hard on it, but it’s not perfect. And ironically, the more successful my book, the more likely it is that I will hear from people who are disappointed.

Getting negative feedback is a problem that every author faces, and it can feel very personal. The rejection of your work might not be personal (it probably isn’t, given that most of the people who reject your work don’t know you personally), but whatever their cause, such rejections are failed hopes and disappointments (even if you can find silver linings in rejection).  

Rejection of work can be particularly difficult for perfectionists. When you’re a perfectionist, and you struggle to make the compromises demanded by practical tradeoffs, it can be hard enough to stop working on something just because the work itself feels incomplete.  The feeling of incompleteness is frustrating and drives many to say “I’m going to keep working.” It’s uncomfortable to stop working on something if you can see problems with it and think you can fix those problems. The idea that you have to show the work to someone else—to someone who might reject it—adds a layer of emotional complexity: not only is it necessary to stop working on something with known imperfections, but you have to show that work to someone else, creating the opportunity for that other person to see and potentially complain about those imperfections.  That’s not easy. At least it’s not easy for a lot of people.

The perfectionist doesn’t want to turn in imperfect work. That’s fine—having high standards is great. But the problem of tradeoffs—the practical limits created by conflicting issues—means that works are always imperfect. So the perfectionist is going to submit imperfect work (or no work at all). But, it is good to remember, that all work is imperfect, so imperfect works can still be of high quality relative to other similar works.

Beyond just “submitting” a work, is the question of getting attention for that work.  Professors are supposed to read the work of their students—and they often do so in a timely fashion. But when submitting a work to a professor, you can improve the response by how it is presented: you don’t have to focus on the problems that you see. You can focus on the strengths of your work—and that can help how your work is treated. Some self-promotion is valuable even when dealing with people who have a responsibility to read your work. But, if you’ve written something, there’s a good chance that you want it to reach beyond a small group of professors. You may want to get published somewhere, and that means reaching out to people who have no responsibility to you whatsoever.  

Practically speaking, to get your work under the eyes of people—from editors and publishers to readers, you need to promote your work, even if you’re a perfectionist who sees flaws. The facts don’t speak for themselves, quite frankly. No matter the quality of your work, it’s unlikely to be recognized if you don’t promote it. That may be submitting to journals or to publishers or some other avenues. Getting into any of those venues, requires self-promotion. In some cases, it’s obviously and explicitly about promotion, not about the quality of the work itself.  Academic journals don’t worry about whether an article will sell, only whether it satisfies review criteria, but journals are the exception.  Book publishers and non-academic publications all have a clear eye towards selling a work.  If you propose a book to an academic publisher, part of the proposal will be dedicated to describing the potential market and competing titles. And part of the proposal may ask what you do to promote your work.

There are some people who are utterly confident in themselves, and such people don’t necessarily struggle to promote themselves. But for perfectionists, it can be a real problem to self-promote, because the critical, perfectionist eye does not create glowing promotions. For creating promotions, a forgiving eye is more useful and effective.

Some perfectionists can promote their work because of their vast enthusiasm for the work itself: if you’re doing excellent work on a subject that you find exciting, it’s pretty easy to promote that, even if you do see weaknesses.  But perfectionism can drain away such enthusiasm, especially if you’re focusing on problems and not on the strengths of your work.

There’s a part of me that really loves my dissertation book. I would love to say that it’s the absolute best book in its class. On a certain level, I absolutely believe it is excellent and presents ideas that don’t appear in other competing books.  But my perfectionist tendencies get hung up on the compromises and choices I made: should it have been shorter? Should it have been longer? Is it too dense? Is it too lightweight?  Should it have been for a more focused audience?  None of these questions can really be answered by any objective standard, and so my answers—my choices—are uncertain.  This makes me doubt my work, even though I would like to believe that it’s the best in its class.  

Such tradeoffs and the choices made to negotiate those tradeoffs make works seem imperfect—but if the tradeoff is ultimately unavoidable, can you let such a tradeoff stop you from finishing your work and extolling it for its virtues, even if it is imperfect? Keep an eye to the strengths of your work so that you can promote it appropriately.

Multidimensionality, trade-offs, and perfectionism

Willie Dixon, the great blues singer, laid out in specific form one of the general problems that people face in decision making when he sang “I’m built for comfort, I’m not built for speed.” (Howlin’ Wolf did versions to which I’m partial.) The general principle is that sometimes there are multiple desirable characteristics that compete against each other.  In automotive design, one common trade-off is the choice between comfort and speed: higher speeds want lower weight vehicles with stiffer suspensions, which means a bumpy ride, while greater comfort wants a softer suspension and greater weight, for a smoother ride.

One could say that a designer could seek both—indeed, it’s possible to seek both comfort and speed, but generally at some other cost (for example, more care in the design process, and more expensive components): a Porsche may not be any faster than a top-of-the-line Nissan, but it will cost more.

Real-world decisions involve many different considerations—different dimensions on which something can be evaluated. The Howling Wolf example explicitly invokes two dimensions, but most decisions involve far more than two dimensions.  One difficulty in evaluation processes is in balancing different evaluative dimensions. 

Consider, for example, the evaluation of an athlete in a team sport. Strength, size, speed, quickness/reaction time, agility, and balance all matter. So do intelligence, confidence, judgment, and ability to work with others. A professional team that considers adding a player to its roster must consider all of these, as well as considering the player’s future prospects, and the cost of signing that player. Do you get the greatest talent, at possible cost to team chemistry, or do you get less talent to support chemistry? In baseball, two of the greatest second basemen of all time exemplify this question: Rogers Hornsby and Eddie Collins were near contemporaries.  There is little debate that Hornsby was the better hitter, but his teams didn’t do particularly well, and often traded him away. Collins, on the other hand, played a key role on multiple championship teams.  Who was greater?  There isn’t a clear answer.

One trade-off that is central to writers is the trade-off between time and quality, about which I’ve written before. You can choose to spend more time on a project in order to improve its quality, but that additional time spent on the project is time that cannot be spent on other projects.  For researchers, this is essentially a never-ending conflict: research never answers every question—indeed, every answer will lead to new questions (Jorge Luis Borges lays out this problem in his essay “Avatars of the Tortoise”).

Perfectionism inevitably runs up against this reality.  There is no “right” answer to these questions.  There are only decisions that one must make.

I suppose my suggestion for a perfectionist is to look beyond any single project to look at something bigger—something that encompasses any single project—a career, for example.

If you focus on one project and want to make that project perfect, that’s great. But what if making that project better means that you don’t spend time on another project?

Where do you focus perfectionist intentions? On individual projects, at possible cost to your career or to your life? Or do you focus your perfectionist intentions on your career, which might lead to making compromises on an individual project?

Again, there isn’t a clear answer, which is why this is such a thorny issue.  You have to make a decision that serves you.   When there are multiple dimensions on which to make an evaluation, and when there are trade-offs, choices become difficult and there is no really objective standard by which to judge. The choice is yours--don't think you've failed because you chose to make a compromise.

The boy who cried wolf and ad hominem arguments

The story of the boy who cried “wolf” is the story of a person who lies, and as a result is not believed when he tells the truth—to his great detriment.

As an academic, one ought not give in to ad hominem arguments--arguments that a claim is false because the speaker is untrustworthy. A liar who tells you that the earth orbits the sun is telling the truth, even if he/she lies very often. Just because a speaker is untrustworthy, doesn’t mean that she/he isn’t telling the truth on a given occasion. This, indeed, is the resolution/denouement of the story of the boy who cried “wolf:” In the end, the boy falls victim to a real wolf because, having given people reason to doubt his veracity, no one is willing to help him when there is a real wolf.

As an academic, it is always appropriate to check the accuracy of statements that other people make, regardless of who makes the statement.

But in real life, having a record of telling the truth matters.  There’s a reason that The New York Times is more respected than The National Enquirer.  The Times is far less likely to publish utter falsehoods.

If you regularly tell lies, people will stop trusting you.  Someone should tell that to Donald Trump, who made a speech on Wednesday in which he proudly announced that he made up stuff when talking with Justin Trudeau of Canada. Trump may tell the truth sometimes. He may tell the truth often. But if he lies often, then people will stop trusting him. And that may be fine for some contexts, but it will surely make it harder for him to negotiate with foreign leaders who will become disinclined to listen to his promises.