On Twitter, somebody asked for my tips for young scholars. There’s no particular reason to think my tips are reliable (google “survivorship bias”) and it may not be possible to implement these, but these really are what I think are the most important.

1. Have lots of ideas. Many of them can be bad, probably most (see #3 below), but you need these or this whole thing is going to be miserable. Which brings us to ..

2. Enjoy writing about them. Some people find working on research independently enjoyable and fun; others regard it as work that is necessary to get other things they regard as enjoyable and fun (like paychecks or promotions or power). You will be much more successful if you are in the first category, which Adam likes to call “research as consumption.”

3. Fail fast. You need to start working on ideas to see if they are good ones, but you also need to abandon them if they are not. You’ll be a better scholar if you can get to the question whether to abandon them faster, rather than spending a year on a bad project, thus either wasting a lot of time or forcing you to delude yourself and deceive your readers into pretending it’s a good project.

4. Have faith in your good ideas. A corollary of #3. Once you’ve decided an idea is worth pursuing, don’t try to dress it up as some other idea that you think is more important or more marketable or more interesting. Les Green put this point very well in a discussion of “bullshit” dissertation titles, such as (the made-up example): Agency, Structure, and Power: The Milk-Marketing Board of Ruritania, 2007-2009:

   “Never allow doctoral students to use subtitles. Either there is good reason to study three years of decisions of the Milk-Marketing Board or there isn’t. . . . If there is, they should have the courage of their convictions and make the subject their title. If there isn’t, do not allow them to waste their intellectual careers on trivia and then package it up in a bullshit title.”

5. Say no. You shouldn’t say no to everything. You want to engage with others, both for their benefit and for yours. But if your research is successful you will have more invitations than you can accept. And time is scarce, so you can’t afford to give all of yours away. To implement this rule, I highly recommend the wise advice of Sarah Lawsky to have a “no buddy,” a trusted professional friend who reviews all of your new commitments before you accept them, and who has the power and duty to say “no” most of the time. Which brings us to….

6. Have friends you can trust. You can have ideas and enjoy writing about them on your own. But to decide which ideas to abandon and which requests for your time you can meet, you need advice, and the best advice comes from people who know you well and whose judgment you can trust. You want to share drafts or sketches or ideas early enough that it’s not too late to abandon them. You want people who know what you are good at and not so good at. In other words, you need friends.

I call this advice unhelpful because I don’t know what to say about how to do some of these things if you don’t already. But I think they are what successful junior scholars truly need.