Dear Junebug,
Today got off to a crappy start. The very first thing I saw this morning after I opened my eyes to turn off my phone alarm was an email from an academic journal acquisitions editor. She told me that while the article I submitted contained good research, it needed substantial revisions if I wanted to ever get it published. She attached my peer reviews, one of which absolutely excoriated the manuscript as “not interesting.” I was taken aback by the criticism, especially since I honed the manuscript repeatedly with the help of my writing group.
This made me feel pretty awful, since it led me to ask some terrible questions . . . am I a crappy scholar? Am I a terrible writer? How could I have been so careless and so stupid to submit something so awful, so beneath the dignity of my profession? My colleagues must hate me. I must be bad. I failed. I’m a failure. AAARRRGGGG!!!
This negative feedback loop did not do me any favors, however. So I went online and read about how Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie (remember that movie we wouldn’t let you watch?), was submitted to thirty publishers before it was picked up, and how Thomas Edison failed thousands of times to perfect the light bulb. Both Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S Grant, the two men who did the most to save the Union during the Civil War, failed spectacularly and repeatedly as businessmen. And yet Robert E. Lee, a man who never failed at anything, the Babe Ruth of American generals, lost his gambit at Gettysburg and eventually lost the war.
What does all of this mean? People fail and they make mistakes. But it is important to learn from those mistakes, and to turn them into positive experiences that give you the knowledge and foresight you need to succeed later in the future. So, while driving to work, I formulated a plan to help me get that article published, and decided to learn how to properly structure a journal article (which I’ve never really done before).
I don’t know whether you’ve seen this article, because I don’t know if I succeeded in making it exist. You know the answer to that as you read this, but I don’t.
What I do know is that I’m probably going to fail a lot more in my life, and you will also fail a lot in your own. So, I will make you a promise: any time you don’t succeed at something and need to feel better about it, call me (or send me a telepathic telegram, or whatever we do in the future to communicate . . . 2015 Me has no idea!), and I’ll tell you about a proportionately large failure of my own. That way, even though you may fail, you’ll never be alone in failure.
And if I’m not available for some reason, watch a video of a cat doing something cute. That also seems to work.
Love, Dad
Dear Junebug 