Blogging belongs to tier 1, for me. Getting a comment from Bob, Olga, Leslie, or Thomas makes my day, even if it is a depressing comment.
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Book proposal is being read at Routledge!
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Another life /work hack is to write an article or equivalent every month. It could be a major keynote address or a book proposal. You might not be able to sustain it, but it is a way of writing yourself out of a funk. I've been doing it since September. The last time I did it was in January 2006, and the result was the renaissance of my career.
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Your weaknesses will be most apparent to yourself, in many cases. As long as you can some up with good results, it doesn't matter that you have weaknesses that made it harder for you. It matters to you, but not to others.
There are several approaches to weaknesses:
Defensive: you can deny them or attempt to conceal them (usually making them worse in the process!).
Opportunistic: you can identify them and work to remedy them.
The approach I've taken often is to ignore them and making my strengths so strong that the weaknesses won't even matter any more. This "works" to a small extent, but then doesn't allow as much personal growth.
2 comments:
At some point a "life hack" becomes a kind of political consciousness. We can put different kinds of writing on your tiers, for example, and then I can get quite indignant that blogging is on tier 1 while writing for "peers" in the formal sense is often on tier 2 or even 3. Universities should be organized so that writing down what we know for other knowledgeable people is a tier 1 activity.
Also, it seems to me that everyone would benefit if teaching were normally a tier 1 activity. It's up to the universities to become places that are populated by (both teachers and students) for whom learning is tier 1. Why do so many people (again, both students and teachers) see class as a chore? The answer has less to do with their internal priorities and more to do with the institution.
Yes, I was happy to see that teaching was a tier 1 for me. Organizing my materials for class, or photocopying, is tier 2, because I don't enjoy doing it, but in the classroom I'm completely there.
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