It’s such a common experience in research. You’ve worked day and night for years on your project. You’ve generated interesting data and, just as you’re doing the final experiments for the paper, a notification pops up in your email: another group just published similar results. Your heart sinks. Your stomach sinks. Your limbic system catastrophises about the “wasted” effort, the “lost” career, the “inevitable” rejection of that fellowship application you planned to write. And if you manage to come to terms with any of that, your heart sinks again when you think about telling your colleagues. If you haven’t been there yet, be prepared, because chances are you will one day. 
 
Why does it hurt so much? Is it really such bad news? And what can we do about it?

Like many in research, I was brought up to produce the highest quality work I can and stay modest about it. If I achieved something worthwhile, I was told, others would notice; it wasn’t my role to tell everyone. Today however, I find myself in a world where ‘selling’ myself, or my team, is an essential survival skill. 
 
Organisational psychologist Adam Grant tells us that achievement attained by compromising our values is not success. 
 
So if we value humility but want to be successful in research, what can we do? Should we sell out on our principles and boast about our achievements, hoping this will bring “success” only for that to feel hollow if it does? Or stay true to ourselves and use whatever strengths this brings?
 
Can we be confident enough to thrive in research without becoming arrogant? Where exactly does the line between them lie?

I’ve always thought of myself as ‘resilient’. For years, I thought that meant being the type who would ‘grin and bear it’ to complete an important task. I particularly remember the 36h non-stop writing marathon to finish my PhD thesis, and tolerating 20 job rejections and a disruptive relocation to secure a PI position. These caused hardship too, but I’d push aside negative emotions to get on with it.
 
So here’s the surprise – I no longer call that ‘resilient’! I call it ‘short-term’ thinking. 
 
I see the success it brought but I also see its cost: to wellbeing, to family and, on numerous occasions, even to productivity. 
 
I still believe lasting success needs seriously hard work, but is that much pain inevitable or is there another, healthier way? A more sustainable form of resilience?

Many of us dislike not having time to explore all our ideas. For as long as each of us can remember, we’ve wanted to figure out how things work and whether we can make them work better. 
 
So here’s the problem: there are an infinite number of things to figure out but only 24 hours in a day. Having more ideas than we can follow is normal! Why then do so many of us feel bad about ideas we don't get around to? Think how awful the opposite would be: to finish our ‘to do’ list and have no ideas for anything else!

​We’re not just overwhelmed with ideas of course. It’s also emails, administration, peer reviewing, requests for favours, information, and even keeping up with the scientific literature. Many of us would like less of some of these to leave more time for research but that perfect world doesn't exist. For each of these areas of work, the same principle applies: 
 
Infinite demands meets finite capacity. So why does it feel so awful if we can't do it all?