All right, let's do one more question about deep work. This one, appropriately enough, comes from Deep Academic. I think if your parents named you that, it would be a shame if you became like a YouTube influencer. So I guess you didn't have any options about what your job was going to be once your parents named you Deep Academic.

Here's a question, how do you handle paper rejection as an academic? How do you help your students get over it? Yeah, it's a good question. I struggle with it. Non-academics don't realize this. They don't realize how incredibly competitive academia is, especially sort of tenure track R1 research institutions. There's these venues in which you can publish your papers that are very stratified.

And it is incredibly hard to get your papers published in the good venues. It's very competitive. Most things get rejected. So you're constantly in this competition. I think the public sometimes has this view of academia where A, they call it teaching, which, again, research-oriented academics, it is a source of frustration that their job is described as teaching.

It's like if you're a professional basketball player and people were like, oh, yeah, you do leg pressing. And you're like, well, yeah, I do leg pressing in the gym as part of my training for being a really good basketball player, which is incredibly competitive and hard. The hardest thing in academia is trying to publish in these competitive venues.

It's intellectual warfare, the very smartest people in the world fighting for a small number of slots. 10% to 15% of what is submitted is going to get accepted. It's very difficult. So you get a lot of rejections. And it's competitive and it's difficult. I struggle with this. I've gone through different phases in my career.

So when I was a graduate student, my pace of publication would be much less, maybe one or two papers a year when I first got going. And it would hit me hard when a paper would get rejected because it's all I had worked on for a few months. And I have notes in my Moleskines I can go find of me reacting to rejections.

I took them hard. But then as I hit my stride as a junior faculty member, the wheel started to click. And I published a lot. And I really got a lot of stuff accepted. So it was a nice golden period where I published a ton of papers, got tenure early, distinguished professorship.

Things were really rolling well. I was publishing four or five papers a month. And then I, more recently-- I've talked about this on the show-- the pandemic knocked me back to the world of not submitting as much, but way more rejections for the small number of things I was submitting.

So I'm back into that world of rejection. Briefly, what happened there for people who are non-academics, again, because it's so competitive, there is an incredibly high quality threshold. And so what happened to me during the pandemic is two things happened. One, I got knocked out of my collaboration cycles because I have collaborators around the world and we meet in person twice a year.

And they're top-notch collaborators. I've known most of them since I was 22 years old at MIT. And they're all over the world, but we meet twice a year. Usually, there's a time in the summer for whatever. There's a conference we all go to. And one of my close collaborators, longtime collaborators, comes back to DC every summer as family's here.

And we bring in other collaborators and we all get together. And that's where most of the ideas were generated that we then write papers on. Turns out, if you don't have those meetings, as happened during the pandemic, you don't have the good ideas to work on. And two, I just didn't have the time.

I just had-- it was the typical impacts a lot of people had, especially people with kids. With the pandemic, I didn't have as much time to spend on research. So I went to about 50% effort. The issue is in competitive academia, 50% effort doesn't mean, oh, you publish 50% less papers.

It means any paper you write, the quality falls just enough that they're all below the acceptance threshold. And so I did that for a year. I basically didn't publish anything. And then I realized, oh, I should probably just put all of my energy into less papers. And last year, I published a very nice paper where I put my energy just-- if I can't have as much time to spend on this, let me put all the time into one paper because I can't fall below it.

But anyways, I've been really struggling with it. It's the lowest publication year last year. It was the lowest publication year I've ever had as a professional academic because of the pandemic. I still struggle with it, the academic. I think it's hard. The best thing you can do is tune up your process.

So after some hard rejections, tune up the process. What's missing here? What do I need to do? What would I need to do to not get rejected as often? Do I need better collaboration, more work, more whatever it is? Figure out how do I tune up my process. And by the way, you can decide, I don't want to do that.

I don't have time to do that. That's not where I am in my career. But be clear about it. And then two, do the real work. So there's no shortcuts around it. You probably just have to do the stuff that's hard. Read the papers, understand what's going on, push your ideas farther than you think they need to be pushed.

Do the work that's required. Tune up your process. It's the best you can do. And then keep in mind there's some stochasticity too. There is going to be some luck. And that should even itself out. But anyways, I'm with you. I came off a five-year period of hot shot publishing down to nothing.

And now I'm crawling back out of that, but carefully because I don't know that I want to go back to hot shot computer science publishing. There's so much other interesting stuff happening in the world now, especially my involvement in digital ethics and some of the public-facing writing I'm doing.

So I'm rebuilding my life from scratch academically. Then we'll have more publications than I just had, but maybe not as much as I used to. It's hard. I feel your pain. Tune process, do real work, recognize there's luck. And otherwise, try not to obsess too much about it because, man, paper rejections is tough.

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