Speaker 1: The first skill that will help you succeed in academia is the ability to hold and fight the duality that will always exist in your mind. So one side of you is experiencing what people are telling you, like that you're an overachiever, that you're really clever and really smart and then the other side, inside your mind and this never goes away, you are going to have the other side of you that has no idea what you're doing. It's the imposter syndrome side and to be able to fight continuously this kind of battle between people telling you you're smart and you feeling the dumbest you've ever felt will help you in academia and to be honest with you I think that's why a lot of professors end up fighting this with pure brute force. They allow themselves to become a bit of an arsehole and it's the only way they can tell the negative side of their psyche to shut up. So it's a skill that you have to constantly kind of like refine and work on because it is a time in your life where people are telling you you're the smartest you've ever been and your mind is telling you you're the dumbest you've ever been and that's just the nature of doing research. You're working on the leading edge and the thing about being on the leading edge of knowledge is that no one knows what they're doing. The second skill that is so very important is to do research and work even when you don't feel like it. Academia is a lot less about being the cleverest one. Sure it's part of it but it's a very small portion compared to the people that are able just to push through when they don't want to actually do the work. Setting up routines, being a little bit kind of strict with yourself about achieving certain things at certain times throughout the day is the way that you make progress. It is about the small amount every single day and it is something that is really tough to do because a lot of us don't find the momentum when we want to have the momentum. If you relied on inspiration things would just never ever get done and so those people that are able to prioritize the tasks that are important for academia, that is coming up with hypotheses, coming up with experiments, doing those experiments, analyzing that data and repeating that over and over again as many times as possible will succeed. It's the people that get sidetracked away from those main skills that will not succeed in academia. Now as you get further up the chain there's no doubt that your priorities change but understanding what priorities are the most important and making sure they are done first despite this really noisy priority that isn't important, it's not urgent, it's just noisy, I think those are the skills that are going to help you move forward in academia. One of the most important skills is being able to work within the bullshit and what I mean by this is that academia is full of so much bullshit you will not believe until you enter it how much rubbish just has to happen in academia. You've got egos, you've got other people's priorities, you've got the university admin, you've got the university's expectations and it all detracts from the main job which is doing research, getting grant money, that sort of stuff. So being able to work within quite a noisy complex system that is just full of bullshit and just be able to pick out the signal from the noise is one of the most important skills. There is so much academic politics, there are so many sort of like competing priorities and I remember saying to one of my colleagues like well what would happen if you just don't do that thing and they were like oh nothing really other than this one person would be upset with them or like the deadline would get pushed out a little bit. Working within the bullshit in academia is very tough because sometimes you do have to participate in the bullshit to get ahead whether or not it's creating little alliances, whether or not it's putting other people on your papers when they've really done nothing. All of these things are an important part of succeeding in academia and I guess it really comes down to building up good collaborations with people that are productive and you kind of get swept along together. So there's no doubt that the bullshit thing isn't just about ignoring it, it's about being selective in which parts of the bullshit you should get involved in and yeah it's a very complicated system and structure and the only thing I can really say is like have a look at people that are successful in academia and have a look to see what they're prioritizing and you probably won't like what they're prioritizing but it's probably helping their career. Another really important skill is being able to enter interdisciplinary fields and learning quickly or finding common ground with other disciplines so that you can work together. I think that as sort of like research progresses and from now interdisciplinary kind of research is going to be the area where the biggest leaps and bounds are made. So if you can get used to speaking to people from other disciplines, reaching out, asking about their research, finding common ground, initiating that conversation, just getting comfortable in other people's fields I think will be a real benefit to your career going forward. It's kind of scary to enter someone else's field because not only now do you feel like you don't know your field, you're entering to this whole new thing and I think that's for me personally quite exciting to learn something new but building up those collaborations and the skills to be able to feel comfortable in someone else's field are going to help you no doubt. The last skill that not a lot of people really exercise in academia is humility. Like I have been around a load of different supervisors and none of them have said to me, oh actually I was wrong or oh I've changed my mind because of new information and it's strange that not many people actually want to admit these things. So having humility even if it's to yourself, admitting to yourself when you were wrong, whether that was about a research project, an idea that you had, a hypothesis that you created, a test that you did, no matter what area of research you have discovered you are wrong, admitting to yourself that that was a wrong decision and moving on quickly will help. A lot of time, especially in academia where ideas are currency, you feel like it's yours and you need to hold on to it and protect it at all costs but being able just to let it go and move on, I think you'll progress much quickly in academia and learn much more along the way as well. So there we have it. There are the five little known skills that I think will really help you in academia that not many people talk about. Let me know in the comments which ones you would add. I love reading all of your experiences and also remember there are more ways that you can engage with me. The first way is to sign up to my newsletter. Head over to andrewstapleton.com.au forward slash newsletter. The link is in the description and when you sign up you'll get five emails over about two weeks, everything from the tools I've used, the podcasts I've been on, how to write the perfect abstract and more. It's exclusive content available for free so go sign up now and also look at academiainsider.com. That's my project where I've got my e-books, my resource packs, the community's growing out over there as well. I've got a blog and it's all there to help academia work for you. Alright then, I'll see you in the next video.