Celebrate every step

Successes in academia often occur long after submissions, and can feel hard to honor.

For example, it can feel more momentous to submit a paper for review, than to see it published months…sometimes years…later after you’ve revised (multiple times), reviewed proofs, and waited weeks (months) for an unknown publication date. It feels strange to celebrate the submission, when the long-term benefit comes so much later, with publication.

Similarly, with grants, we spend months/years drafting and redrafting our ideas. After we submit, it might be 4-5 months until we hear what the reviewers thought, and even if we get a fundable score, it might be 9 more months before it’s funded (speaking from recent experience with NIH).

As such, I recommend that we start celebrating every submission, every step toward our desired outcomes. A friend suggested making a table with goals in the first column, ways to celebrate them in the second column, dates achieved, and date reward was claimed. This is a particularly great idea amid times of COVID outbreaks or when you are too busy to celebrate. A mentor also shared that they celebrated grant submissions with their whole family to honor that their children and spouse also made sacrifices to allow this researcher to have the time to submit the grant (sad but true that grants often require nights and weekends work time).

If we don’t celebrate the steps along the way, sometimes we forget or take for granted all the effort it took.