New Books Coming in 2010
You! What you MUST know to start your career as a professional
Lessons, specific ones, comprise a continuing topic in this book, an ongoing theme or leitmotif as the musicians like to say. If you have any sense of history, you know that the most interesting history ‘reads’ are those where the author tries to look for patterns, for motives, for something beyond the old line ‘one damned thing after another’. And so that theme of patterns, of reasons, of lessons, is the essence of this book. The important thing is the lessons, the learning, the wisdom of a professional life. Or, to use another oft-quote line, this time from the movies, ‘what’s it all about Alfie?’
If we were to summarize the key lessons of this book, we might come away with the following ten. So, here’s at it.
1.The odds are that you’re going to live a long time. Don’t mess up the feeding trough that will be the source of your professional growth, and more than likely your livelihood. Be sensitive about what you do. Things do come back to bite. You don’t want that to happen. Period.
2.Kindness, kindness, kindness. I once read a blog which stated that ‘when I was young I admired cleverness; now that I’m old I admire kindness’. You can’t be too kind. It will pay dividends. Don’t worry about wasting kindness. Just be kind.
3.What you do as a young professional is excusable. You may think that an error you make when you are young will follow you around. Chances are that no one notices it, or if someone notices it when you are young, it will be forgotten.
4.The pen is mightier than the sword. It helps to practice writing. When you write to be read (not to be remembered, to be read), you may be pleasantly surprised. Think of your writing as an investment that you make and forget. Sometimes unexpected dividends show up in the mail. That’s good.
5.Publish a lot. When you start out no one cares, even if you have ground-breaking work. Your goal is to go beyond the starting out, to create a corpus of your own work. That work will support you. Promise.
6.Everyone gets rejected from journals. It’s not worth killing yourself over. The peer review system is flawed. So what. If you don’t get it published in an ‘A’ journal, try a ‘B’ journal, and then a ‘C’ journal. Just get it published.
7.When you look for something to be right, it’s better to be 80% right and on time than 100% right and late. When you miss the train, miss the boat, miss the chance, it’s gone. Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
8.If you’re miserable in your job, your post-doc, whatever, remember that you can generally move. If worst comes to worst, and it does, think about going out as a consultant. You can then get fired by each client, and still survive. What a wonderful lesson. Change, don’t die.
9.You’re not as important as you think. Abandon your amour propre. You’re not that important at all. So enjoy life. By the time you become very important you’ll be old or dead. And you won’t be able to enjoy life very much. Arthritis happens; that’s the least of it. Carpe diem; seize the day.
10.Educate yourself so that you understand more than a simple, narrow field. It helps to read history, literature, philosophy. It’s even interesting. There was a world before you were born, there were ideas before you were weaned, and the truth is, these will be there long after you’re gone. So imbibe some culture. And not just the culture in yogurt. You'll be a better scientist and professional because of it.... details
Future High Tide of High End (Tentative title)
(H. Moskowitz, A. Gofman, S. Marzano, & M. Bevolo) ...
details
