What's luck got to do with it?

Every exam period at our school began the same way. Our head teacher gathered us in assembly and told us: “I would wish you ‘good luck’ but luck has nothing to do with it”. I was at an impressionable age and completely swallowed the myth that hard work was all it took. Up to a point it was a useful message. I did work hard and it served me well. But decades later I see the errors in that message. I was already lucky to be bright, lucky to have a (mostly) stable family, lucky to have parents who prioritised my school work and lucky not to suffer from exam nerves. Many are not so lucky.
 
The limits of luck
Fast forward 15 years to my first fellowship application. Life was less simple by then. My application was not even shortlisted, judged to be “too risky”, “lacking preliminary data”, “unlikely to work”. 

​Multiple desk rejections of my best paper followed: “not of general interest”, “more suited to a specialist journal”. If what I’d been told about hard work at school was the truth, how could a decade and a half full of hard work take me from being the equal-first student in my school to get into Oxbridge to repeated failure? Or was something else going on? It was a deeply confusing time.

​25 years further on I feel I understand it a lot more. But if you’re in that position today, lying awake all night worrying about your future as I did, and asking whether you’ve lost your touch, it may be less clear to you.
 
First process the pain
Rejection is truly awful. It always hurts. fMRI studies show it activates the same brain regions as physical pain, and it does so for good reason. For most of human evolution, avoiding exclusion was a life or death issue. The pain associated with it kept our ancestors alive long enough to make us. Another article in this series may help you find better ways to manage it. Until you do that, it will be hard to get beyond the inevitable emotions and see the truths behind how grant and paper decisions really work.  
 
Is it just you?
We don’t usually see other people’s CV of failures but we all bear the scars of our own, every one of them. For full disclosure, I’ve had 51 grant rejections in my career so far, including recent ones, and individual papers rejected by up to eight different journals. But we still found a home for the papers and a way to do the projects we felt most strongly about. Several of our most important discoveries even came this way. Even Nobel Prize winners have their papers and grants rejected. Most famously, Katalin Karikó, whose work made the COVID-19 vaccine possible, had key parts of that work rejected both for funding and for publication, and then lost her job because of it. But to our enormous benefit, she still found a way. 
 
At some point then, the penny starts to drop: rejection does not mean you are a bad scientist, or that the work is flawed. It could even, quite literally, be world-changing. What really matters is whether you keep your belief in it. 
 
Is it just science?
Spectacular mistakes happen everywhere too. An early investor in Apple Computer Company sold his 10% stake for $800. 12 publishers rejected the first Harry Potter book. Rejection is a part of every career. 
 
We know life isn’t fair, but for whatever reason, we often struggle to accept this in research life.

​The fallout
How many promising young researchers quit science because they trust this decision process too much, seeing it as an objective view of their abilities? How many of those who stay are constantly anguished by its unpredictability?
 
Rejection of your paper, grant or job application is not a rejection of you. Some reviewers choose their words poorly and may make it sound like this, but no reviewer or editor speaks for everyone. You are bigger, the world is bigger.
 
The truth behind scientific judgements
The late Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman told us: “Wherever there is human judgement, there is noise”. So how does 'noise' compare between the school exam process and paper or grant reviews?

​My head teacher was certainly wrong about the role of luck in school success generally. It does play a role. But in the exam itself, going in with whatever attributes one is lucky or unlucky enough to have, he was partly right. Everyone answers the same set of questions, they are marked according to strict criteria by people more experienced than us, they are moderated so scores are consistent and there is accountability and an appeals process. 
 
Contrast this with reviews of grant applications or papers. Current methods are considered the ‘least worst’ but, unlike at school, apples have to be compared with oranges, scoring criteria are open to interpretation, reviewers sometimes know less about the topic than the authors, and there is very limited accountability or scope for appeal. 
 
This is human judgement of highly specialised work. It is about as ‘noisy’ as it gets!
 
The most bizarre question is why any of us would think this is objective? It does enrich for good work but no single judgement, whether acceptance or a rejection, is sure to be ‘correct’. We make all kinds of problems for ourselves if we believe it is more than this.
 
Make your own luck
If luck plays such a big role, can we get more of it? Networking at conferences can introduce us to new collaborators, impress potential future reviewers, attract excellent co-workers and even bring funding opportunities. The more journals we send a paper to, the greater the chance that it lands on a favourable reviewer’s desk somewhere. 

When serendipity strikes in the lab, we can dismiss unusual observations or see their potential to take us somewhere new and exciting. My whole career stems from such an observation made by my postdoc supervisor, Hugh Perry. As Pasteur told us: “Chance favours the prepared mind”. We can even build a habit of sometimes doing ‘quick and dirty’ experiments to test more ideas in the shortest possible time, identifying those that seem worth following up more carefully. 
 
Understanding the roles luck plays in a science career can help us manage the anguish of rejection. Once we accept that it is ever present, and will sometimes inevitably go against us, we can focus our efforts on giving it more opportunities to work for us.