“How To Be a Happy Academic” by Alexander Clark & Bailey Sousa, published 2018, seeks to understand motivation and happiness in academia. Thoroughly researched, kind, clever, and written from a values-based perspective, I appreciated the thoughtful and reflective perspective it encouraged the reader to take. Unfortunately, the good of the message was occluded by poor writing and I found myself unable to look past this. I read the first third of the book, so I got enough of a sense of it to realise it wasn’t for me, but not enough to be able to properly rate and review — thus, this is an incomplete assessment.

Why I Was Unable To Finish the Book

Somewhere between a social science journal article and a quasi-self-help book, “Happy Academic” was wordy and indirect. Written in the stereotypically academic style, academics are referred to as “academic knowledge workers”, basic concepts stated and restated, and simple messages clogged with filler. The repetition in this book gave the impression that the two authors contributed their independent pieces without strong integration after the fact. Such repetition occurred frequently, both on the sentence level — e.g.,

One cannot become successful in academic work just because one believes that one is successful. (53)

[N]or can they be deemed to be successful simply because they see themselves as being ‘successful’. (54)

— as well as structurally and ideologically — e.g., within the section on managing emails subheadings “Schedule time to do emails” and “Do emails at set times”, containing practically the same information, appear less than half a page apart (180).

And so on. So much of this book felt like word-count waffle, as if the first draft made it all the way to press without any editing or thorough rereading. Fundamentally, I think this was never meant to be a book. Reading as a series of short reviews and worked exercises (complete with motivational quotes in bolded, all-caps, size 50 font), perhaps this would be better digested in its original format as a workshop, or series of blog posts…

All of which is a great shame though, as the message — of at least the first third— was very interesting. Although I didn’t read the whole book, and therefore can’t exactly speak to what came later, the first third that I did read contained very insightful and interesting points, and I would like to have a go at summarising it in a short and simpler format.

What I Took Away

The primary argument of the book, as I read it, is that in order to be happy (in life, in academia), one must first do the hard work of figuring out what that would even look like.

If specifying your success indicators, priorities, goals, and tasks feels hard, this is because it is. (29)

One of the key traits of knowledge work is that it typically cannot be measured in terms of progress or performance. Unlike traditional pursuits where hours-at-work linearly correlate to work-done (e.g., brick-laying, hair-dressing, client-facing accounting), knowledge work (e.g., artists, entertainers, authors, scientists) has a unknown and often totally unquantifiable relationship between input and output. Breakthroughs can emerge from a moment of inspiration just as easily as from years of relentless effort. You can develop routine, discipline, and structure to support the likelihood of making it big, but at the end of the day, when pressing the boundaries of the unknown and the new, there is no protocol for clocking in at the ‘brilliant idea’ factory.

Besides, what kind of ‘brilliant ideas’ would this factory even be producing? In the choose-your-own-adventure of life, so too in the knowledge work career, success is in the eye of the beholder. Would it be considered more successful to have published 1 world-changing paper, or 100 medium impact papers? To supervise an array of students who find their passions outside of their employment, or guide a limited few into stellar career heights? A case could be made for any of these options, and everything in between. What ‘a good career’ looks like is anyone’s guess, and everyone’s question — driving our search for meaning and mission. Without anything to measure, however, the academic is left mostly to assess and justify their own success to themselves and their higher-ups, with no clear framework or genuinely meaningful KPIs. Some find comfort in this unknowability. Many find dread.

The primary ailments of academics tend to be an equal-parts measure of burn out and imposter syndrome. I think the ‘Happy Academic’ is proposing that that this is a symptom of unknowable autonomy and the sheer breadth of what it means to be an ‘academic’.

While doctoral education has focused predominantly on developing extensive and deep methodological and substantive knowledge, the actual demands of academic work extend far wider to encompass workplace skills, approaches and reactions to uncertainty, leading teams and managing people — amongst many, many other things. (17)

While necessary, being highly educated and proficient in substantive and methodological domains is insufficient for academic work. ‘Highly educated for what…?’ one might ask. (17)

We know how to design experiments, but do we know how to manage ourselves, our careers, and our emotions? It takes a phenomenal amount of confidence to look out into the immeasurable sea of possibilities, simultaneously filled and barren of metrics, measures, and comparisons, and then sit back and think ‘although I have no way of measuring or comparing it, I’m probably doing pretty well’. The more common reaction is to innately feel that one is not doing well enough. Without knowing which way success lies, how to get there, or what meaningful milestones lay along the way, those who crave success (or flee from failure) sprint headlong towards any glimpse of opportunity. And so they flog themselves, pushing up against burn out, chased by imposter syndrome and feelings of inadequacy. Harder, harder, harder. Earlier, later, longer days trying to clock in at the ‘brilliant ideas’ factory, looking around, unsure if they alone are the only one who hasn’t figured it out yet.

(Paraphrased) “There’s really nothing to be gained by working until 11 o’clock at night, other than that tenure hurdle that is somewhere out there. Sometimes you have to know where there is this point of diminishing return, where if I keep pounding at this one front, then yes, I may nail it, but at the same time, it will then be for a very high cost in other areas.” Helms, 2010. (51)

So how do we escape from this vicious cycle between burnout and searching for validation? To be happy and content in the workplace, Clark and Sousa say, we need to take a moment to step back from this grind-stone and actually figure out exactly what it is we’re grinding for anyway. And that knowledge, they say, will come from within.

Values frame everything: not only whether we are successful, but what we believe success even is. (35)

Rather than trying to artificially sterilize the workplace of the self, Clark and Sousa lean into the deeply personal elements of academia (arguments that are very comeplling and helped me realise the sheer scope of ‘academia’) and construct an entire framework around a core of personal values, showing how these flow on to inform our conceptions of success, our priorities and goals, all the way down to our daily tasks (27). You figure out your values, you use these to define success, from these you break it down to success indicators (and milestones), then use these to drive the work you do and how you do it; eschewing cookie-cutter metrics and personalising this entirely to yourself. While recognising that this personal insertion ‘may appear ‘privileged’’ to some (70), they stress that in an otherwise metricless profession, the only way to make gravity is to define your own core.

And that was about as far as I got with it… Problem: Knowledge work → Unmeasurable → Self-defined success → Unsure where you stand → Imposter Syndrome → Try harder → Burn out → Lack of validation → Sadness. Solution: Values → Goals → Milestones → Action → Happiness.

Maybe when I’m a little further down the road of academia (if I be so lucky as to progress beyond the PhD) I’ll return to this and understand more of what Clark and Sousa were trying to communicate to me. For now, however, I’ll have to leave it here.