excellent. i think civil servants both have this feeling of being underpaid while also a sneaking fear they don't have transferable skills. i also suspect that people rarely take into account the pension - was your job actually a pay rise when taking that into account? I suspect it's really only the very top grades in the CS that are seriously underpaid as most others have been badly affected by grade inflation too
Another realm of frequent rejection is scientific publishing. When at Penn as a postdoc I had a peer who had the maxim "rejection is the norm" and tried to normalise talking about the papers rejected as well as those accepted to the extent that he and some of the PhD students he worked with would post on social media when their papers were rejected to make it clear to others that it is the default. It can be very off-putting to new researchers who've slogged for years to have a string of rejections, unless you realise that tweaking, reformatting, resubmitting is absolutely the norm.
Footnote 2 made me smile. That is exactly how being a DD feels!
But something generally that's been true for me is that at every stage, I have thought - the next promotion, that's when I will feel like a grown up but it hasn't happened yet!
Is that grade inflation? Or just how it is, the real power is always a bit further away than you think it is? Or do I just not understand what it feels like?
The commercial version of this is the same problem with one difference: sales counts the rejections on purpose.
Nobody in a sales org is surprised by a no, because the ratio is on a dashboard. If you close one in twenty, then each no is roughly 5% of a yes, and after a while it genuinely stops feeling personal. That's not resilience, it's arithmetic. Forty applications over fifteen months is a completely normal funnel. It only felt catastrophic because you had no denominator.
Which is the thing I'd add to your footnote 17. The way to tell whether you're doing something wrong isn't the number of rejections, it's where in the process they happen. Forty rejections before a first interview means the CV or the targeting is off. Six or eight interviews and no offer means something different, and probably harder to fix.
Your point about the invisible half is the part that matters most though. In sales the ratio is published. In careers everyone hides theirs, so we all benchmark against a number nobody has.
The ability to Grind and Iterate are the two values that have helped me immensely. Whether job, investing, personal.
Grind : what Edrith covers in this post. Most achievements require consistent application, taking setbacks along the way.
Iterate : this one is equally important. Without improvement, the Grind might end up in outright failure, 100 tries later. None of us are born "genius". Michaelangelo had many failed statues before creating David. David itself was a block of marble that two artists had given up before it got to Michaelangelo. You have to learn from your setbacks, your rejections. The next attempt has to be better. Smarter. Only way to get to a successful outcome.
I strongly suspect, although it's not my area of expertise, that willingness to accept rejection is strongly related to the quality of parenting you experienced as a child and your family's ability to cover for your early adult mistakes, plus some of it will be genetic. I should think most people can get better at rejection like they can get better at anything else, but luck and advantages of birth aren't just a couple of items on the list of things that play a part in success in life; they tend to be the paper the list is written on.
excellent. i think civil servants both have this feeling of being underpaid while also a sneaking fear they don't have transferable skills. i also suspect that people rarely take into account the pension - was your job actually a pay rise when taking that into account? I suspect it's really only the very top grades in the CS that are seriously underpaid as most others have been badly affected by grade inflation too
Another realm of frequent rejection is scientific publishing. When at Penn as a postdoc I had a peer who had the maxim "rejection is the norm" and tried to normalise talking about the papers rejected as well as those accepted to the extent that he and some of the PhD students he worked with would post on social media when their papers were rejected to make it clear to others that it is the default. It can be very off-putting to new researchers who've slogged for years to have a string of rejections, unless you realise that tweaking, reformatting, resubmitting is absolutely the norm.
Timely :) I do try and be open about failures for just this reason, but quite often there are other people involved which makes things tricky.
Footnote 2 made me smile. That is exactly how being a DD feels!
But something generally that's been true for me is that at every stage, I have thought - the next promotion, that's when I will feel like a grown up but it hasn't happened yet!
Is that grade inflation? Or just how it is, the real power is always a bit further away than you think it is? Or do I just not understand what it feels like?
The commercial version of this is the same problem with one difference: sales counts the rejections on purpose.
Nobody in a sales org is surprised by a no, because the ratio is on a dashboard. If you close one in twenty, then each no is roughly 5% of a yes, and after a while it genuinely stops feeling personal. That's not resilience, it's arithmetic. Forty applications over fifteen months is a completely normal funnel. It only felt catastrophic because you had no denominator.
Which is the thing I'd add to your footnote 17. The way to tell whether you're doing something wrong isn't the number of rejections, it's where in the process they happen. Forty rejections before a first interview means the CV or the targeting is off. Six or eight interviews and no offer means something different, and probably harder to fix.
Your point about the invisible half is the part that matters most though. In sales the ratio is published. In careers everyone hides theirs, so we all benchmark against a number nobody has.
That's a great point - thank you.
The ability to Grind and Iterate are the two values that have helped me immensely. Whether job, investing, personal.
Grind : what Edrith covers in this post. Most achievements require consistent application, taking setbacks along the way.
Iterate : this one is equally important. Without improvement, the Grind might end up in outright failure, 100 tries later. None of us are born "genius". Michaelangelo had many failed statues before creating David. David itself was a block of marble that two artists had given up before it got to Michaelangelo. You have to learn from your setbacks, your rejections. The next attempt has to be better. Smarter. Only way to get to a successful outcome.
Great point.
I strongly suspect, although it's not my area of expertise, that willingness to accept rejection is strongly related to the quality of parenting you experienced as a child and your family's ability to cover for your early adult mistakes, plus some of it will be genetic. I should think most people can get better at rejection like they can get better at anything else, but luck and advantages of birth aren't just a couple of items on the list of things that play a part in success in life; they tend to be the paper the list is written on.