00:13
I think everyone has moments like that, and that's normal, right?
You just wanted to talk about it, and it was attached to something you really wanted to do.
And still want to do, right?
And then there's a third stage of griefing, which is embarrassment.
After all of these initial disappointments are over, I was so embarrassed.
I realized that I'm very embarrassed about not doing that.
Not asking who I'm writing this for, or not giving enough thoughts.
It sounds like such a rookie mistake, and that's what the feedback person also said.
It's a common beginner mistake when you're writing fellowships or any grants for the first time.
You are just targeting the wrong audience.
These are things that you need to tailor and tune it for your desired audience.
I do this for presentations. I do this for other things.
I just didn't apply what seemed like pretty common sense to this writing.
And it just felt like such a rookie mistake.
How did I not catch this? Maybe I was just too excited.
Maybe there was a time crunch.
But yeah, like he just pointed out, I made those mistakes too.
It's very common.
Especially when you're coming from a different field, or a slightly different field,
the norm is different.
It's easy to miss, and in fact, it's something that
you probably kind of hone throughout your research life.
And then I had to remember that my grad school advisor, my PhD advisor,
was very successful, relatively speaking, in getting grants.
As his grad student, I never worried about running out of fundings because we always had some.
And I remember having a conversation with him saying that his success rate,
on average, his lifetime success rate for grants is about 25%.
03:01
One out of four proposals that he writes gets some amount of money, whether it's big or small.
My research core of it doesn't really change.
I'm still looking at the same kind of scientific problems.
But you do need to tailor for different funding agencies.
It's not like it's four different ideas.
It's like four similar ideas.
Similar ideas packaged differently to different people.
And if my PI, whose success rate is 25%, and it's considered very good for industry standard,
you know, a rookie like me having her first from scratch grant not accepted is
probably not an anomaly.
No, no, it's certainly not an anomaly, right?
So, yeah.
And also, in my thought dumping notebook, I have noted,
and this is why I like my thought dumping notebook,
because I write gems like this without thinking about it.
But I have it here say,
might as well make rookie mistakes while you're actually a rookie.
It's not going to be so cute.
Soon.
But I think it's true.
I think there's some truth in there.
Oh, it's true.
It's true.
I don't know why I find it so funny that that's what you had written in there.
But it's certainly true.
That's how I talk to myself, apparently.
Yep, yep.
No, I'm not.
I don't think I'm surprised.
I think I'm just absorbing the impact of what your journal must sound like when you reflect back on it.
I'm not just sassy to everyone.
I'm sassy to myself, too.
Usually, the sass that anybody carries with them is strongest when aimed at themselves.
So, it's just truth for the...
Just evidence for the truth that exists.
So, okay.
See, I think I highly agree with that.
When you're trying new things, testing out ideas,
I never expect my first trial to go right in my experiments.
Yeah.
Like, I do something with fully in mind that I'm going to have to troubleshoot something about this.
And I think for some reason, that was not a hard lesson to learn for me
because I knew that my experiments are hard.
And I knew that the troubleshooting is the natural part of doing experimental physical chemistry.
06:10
Right.
But maybe just because of the sheer lack of writing grants experience or
somehow really being convinced that this sounds like a good opportunity for me
or sounds like something I deserve,
I was maybe blinded about the fact that this is just like any other experiment.
And something that one troubleshoots over and over.
And yeah.
So, it's just a part of the process, I guess.
Yeah.
But it just occurred to me that I didn't have that sensibility that I knew in some different
parts of my experience into this grant writing elements of it.
And then once I sort of arrived to that place of like,
you know, might as well make the rookie mistake while you're a rookie.
Um, I feel like I feel I say this with like a caveat, like I do feel better.
But I'm still embarrassed.
So.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, it doesn't you don't have to feel one thing at a time.
Right.
And like, it sounds like the embarrassment certainly hit you both.
Surprisingly, like you weren't you weren't expecting that.
And it hit you with quite a bit of intensity.
Right.
So, you came to this realization of yes, it might be, quote unquote, good to make the
mistakes now.
But it doesn't like a realization that is also that is both sassy, if true, and like,
effectively, you know, well reasoned and honestly, somewhat intellectual, right?
Because it's saying, well, better now than later.
That certainly doesn't just wipe the slate of the emotional response.
Right.
And I think what you're experiencing is certainly normal for a lot of people who have any type.
Yeah, yeah, with any any type of, you know, rejection, failure of any kind.
And yeah, I just like caught me off guard.
09:03
Because I generally consider myself to be fairly like, risk taker.
Like, I did the fear of not trying is way bigger than fear of trying.
That's usually just my like, default mode.
Yeah, okay.
I understand.
Right.
So you get leaned into just trying it, right?
That's right.
You lean into just doing it.
Exactly.
And the byproduct of that is that I am fairly experienced in failures and rejections
throughout my life.
And or so I thought.
And like, this particular flavor of failure, I guess, is new to me.
And like, it's just like, hitting me with a lot of unexpected embarrassment.
Yeah, I can see how intense it is.
Obviously, the viewers can't.
But this feeling is like, potent and strong.
And it seems to be just sitting with you, right?
Which I think is, let me go back to your sassy self-talk note for a second here.
It's not only better to make the mistakes as a rookie, but it is in fact better to experience
the emotional feeling behind any type of mistake and or success, right?
When you are like, starting off.
If you go a long time without having hit, in fact, if you had gotten this grant, right?
This type of funding.
And you didn't experience it.
And you didn't go and ask questions.
And you didn't find out those.
Not only would you not have maybe gained some of the lessons, but then when it happened
later, because the likelihood that it happens is still there, you would then have the previous
experience probably compounding on top of this.
Being like, but I did it here.
So why didn't I do it again?
Right?
Having to reckon with that when you are supposedly more experienced, I think, is harder.
I have all these excuses of like, oh, I'm new.
I'm starting.
I'm a rookie.
I have all of these other things right now.
But the amount of embarrassment I would feel when I'm like 20 years into this field.
Oh, painful.
Yeah, don't imagine it.
You don't have to imagine it.
You don't need to do a gedankenexperiment type thing right now.
The other thing you said is that you felt that you had attached to sort of the outcome.
12:00
But I think what's really important there is your experience of like attaching yourself
to the product, but also the process, the idea, the thing, right?
Like you put yourself into it, which I'm not judging anyone out there, right?
It is we do that, right?
Because we care about some of the stuff we do.
Some of the stuff we do.
And that's fine, but it does put part of you out there, right?
It makes it important and valid and something you're invested in.
Now, the other way to look at this is that if you put all of yourself into this one thing
and say you got it, right?
And then later, now it's attached to your psyche.
You are a person who gets funding.
Try to reconcile an identification of yourself as a person who gets funding to then fail
to get funding in the future, right?
Yeah.
Like that is a deeply mind-shattering approach.
I think this sucks in terms of the want and the desire and that like, I want the thing,
right?
It would be good to get the thing and, not but, but and you now are experiencing the
embarrassment, perhaps, because you feel yourself, you could have done X, Y, or Z, which is
normal, except also probably not really fair on you, right?
Different field.
You don't have the same connections.
You don't have the same mentorship yet.
Building that is different, even if it is a transferable or related skill thing, right?
All these factors were at play.
But now you're experiencing both those things.
Eh, fair enough.
Fair enough.
A unique experience.
Yeah, I guess, yeah, I mean, all of this, I think, I mean, there's no doubt that it's
necessary.
In fact, I do think it is important time to time to fail.
Yeah.
Hopefully, in like, you know, not in like irredeemable way, but like, in a way that
like, look, yeah, like in a way that's like, it hurts your ego a little once in a while.
Like, yeah, I mean, you don't want that to happen all the time.
But I think, I think it's like, I've had a pretty good streak for like the past year
or two.
And like, it was, it was about to happen, it was bound to happen at some point.
And this is the time that happens.
And yeah, like whenever you're doing anything new, which is the nature of research, you
know, the whole point of research is that you're doing something new that people haven't
done yet.
There will be steep learning curve, and there will be plenty of failures, and some are more
15:10
public than the others, like this one.
And like, I think it was, if anything, it was a good reminder that I thought I was used
to handling failures.
Or rejections in like, a way that is largely positive.
But this time, it was like, it was a surprise kind of caught me off guard type of situation.
Because I thought I was pretty prepared for whatever outcome, because I really enjoyed
the process of developing this.
But turns out, I also wanted the outcome.
Sure, of course.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, I mean, there's like, nothing much more to say about it, I guess.
It's, you know, it's not, it's not nothing groundbreaking about this experience.
I think people experience this to a different degree in various circumstances.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, it doesn't have to be groundbreaking for it to be important.
Like this, I guess, yeah, this is, one could say that.
Yeah, don't, don't mix the human experience with the grant and fellowship proposal experience
about, you know, like importance versus those, those are different types of importance, right?
This is human related importance.
This is like, people will experience this, if they are within, you know, a category of
stepping out to take risks to try things to possibly fail to possibly experience rejection.
This is a very specific one, right, towards somebody within an academic research type
field.
But I think that it's still a bit generalizable.
And I'm certain that people who are listening within the audience here, right, that tend
to be probably in that ballpark, will find some relatability to this.
And that itself is important, because I think you and I have mentioned this before, perhaps
outside of or inside of the podcast, but like, this, the the failure bits are not well seen
within academia sometimes, right?
It's, it's, or outside.
Yes, right.
So, yes, yeah.
It like, I feel like it only, I mean, one, it's not very seen.
18:03
And two, it's frequently only seen with, like a combination of, but then I recovered story.
It's the underdog type stories.
It's the like, yes, the wonders of the world.
Everything came together with a crescendo and a bang and a plot twist.
Yeah, like it only, it's only talked about as a stepping stone to bigger success.
Right.
And sometimes I think, like, I mean, I don't know, maybe I can repackage this into something
better.
And like, maybe I'll get something bigger out of this.
But like, sometimes failures are just failures.
And there's like, not much more than that.
And, and, and that's, I feel like that should be talked about more as well.
You know, like, and sometimes it just hurts.
And, and that's it.
Like the whole point is that it hurts.
And it doesn't, it doesn't have to be a story, as somebody had said.
So, you know, I like seeing a whole range of things.
But yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, this, this episode needs to be cut a whole lot.
But yeah, we'll figure this out.
I think, thank you for sharing.
I think everybody, there will be some relatability within here.
So, you know.
Yeah, I hope so.
And I hope that I will have a different kind of embarrassment listening to this like a
few months down the road.
Like, thank God I'm not there anymore.
Yeah.
Look, maybe there's a reason that, you know, we don't listen right away to the things that
we either write or read or like record, right?
You got to give some time between those so that you have space.
I can already feel the future cringe.
But you get to have a future cringe, which is important.
So.
All right.
That's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening and find us on X at Ego de Science.
That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C.
See you next time!
