Chasing the new: The unintended consequences of the beginner’s mind
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When you started your academic journey—or maybe even any time you leveled up to a new stage in your career—everything felt shiny and new. Opportunities were everywhere, and every single one of them showed potential for success. In fact, success likely came easy in those early days. There’s an excitement to those first wins when you’re just beginning a project, when you’re chasing an idea and everything is still glowing with possibility. But, the thrill of those early successes can have an unintended consequence: you may start chasing novelty rather than seeing things through to completion. How many times have you started a new, exciting, project instead of dedicating time to writing up the perhaps less-than-earth-shattering findings from an existing study?
This is the blessing and the curse of the beginner’s mind. The qualities that make you a great academic—having an open and curious mindset—are the qualities that lead you to new ideas. And of course, new ideas are the currency of academia without which we cannot succeed. But, this inherent joy of the beginner’s mind becomes problematic when your projects are never finished. You may even be tempted to prematurely declare something a failure so that you can justify chasing a new idea. Worse still, you may jump mindlessly between career opportunities in order to not have to deal with the hard stuff.
Seeking novelty is normal. In fact, novelty seeking is pretty much a default across species. For instance, rats, monkeys, babies and adult humans alike show what researchers call a novelty preference effect. Basically, everyone likes to look more at new things than at things that are familiar. But constantly seeking novelty won’t provide you with the resilience you need to persist when things get difficult or tedious (like dealing with that second set of reviewer comments on your manuscript). And it is precisely that resilience—your ability to deal with the frustrating plateaus and regressions certain to occur on your career journey—that will lead you to real success.
One day, I was evaluating a career opportunity, and one of my mentors asked me a question that stopped me right in my tracks: Are you running towards something or away from something? I was silent. He explained further that there is a difference between running towards a new role that would help me grow meaningfully in my career versus merely running away from an uncomfortable situation or one in which I had not done the hard work to figure out how to thrive. Was I pursuing growth or escaping discomfort? It was definitely the latter. I took some time, revisited and adapted my strategic vision, and gained clarity on what it would take for any new opportunity to meet my threshold of ‘pursuing growth’.
This tension—running towards or running away—plays out at every stage of the academic career. It is important to pause and recognize when it is necessary to pivot, and when you should persist. Having a clear strategic vision, and a set of goals that lead to that vision, will help you make that distinction. If you have an amazing new idea, that’s fantastic! But, that doesn’t mean that new idea needs to be executed immediately. Write it down and save it for the next round of grant applications after you’ve submitted some of those manuscripts that are hanging around. Or maybe even dedicate some time to it each month or each week to exploring this idea, but don’t let it derail your most important and urgent goals.
Exploring new ideas and new projects is exciting, but meaningful success often comes from persistence. What are you currently running toward, and what might you be running from? I encourage you to thoughtfully evaluate your next steps. If you need help recommitting to a goal that leads meaningfully to your strategic vision, let’s get on a call!
Next week: When to pivot and when to persevere
