Love Your (Academic) Work!

You became an academic because you are excited about ideas and about communicating those ideas to others. How many nights have you stayed up late with colleagues discussing ideas? Don’t you still do that at conferences sometimes? Heck, that kind of free flowing intellectual conversation is probably your definition of a good night out.

You should love your job. And yet, the positive joy at discovering new things and telling the world about them has been tempered by fear. Fear is not conducive to getting anything written, as you may have discovered. And it is certainly not conducive to submitting whatever you have written for publication. Fear makes it hard to set priorities and create boundaries around your work.

I firmly believe that your academic career has the potential for joy as well as success. I want to help you make that possibility a reality. An academic career is a path, and there are a lot of different paths that an academic career can take. Tap into your deep curiosity. Develop a writing practice that will create knowledge. Confidently share that knowledge with those who would benefit from it — students; other scholars; curious people outside of the academy, whether they be practitioners, policy makers, or others.

Love your academic work because it is meaningful and satisfying, and because it does not take over your whole life. Eat. Sleep. Play. Love. Create.