Don’t Sweat the Conference Talk

Today I realized I’m traveling to a conference in a week.

“I wonder what the topic of my presentation is,” I said to myself and went to look it up.

“Huh,” I thought when I found out the title. I’d sent in a blurb to that conference in April and gave it no more thought since then.

Writing conference talks is a bizarre way of wasting time. I cull mine out of books I’m writing, and that allows me to give them no thought at all. The whole point of going to the conference is to have 4 days to space out over my new book in an almost uninterrupted manner.

2 thoughts on “Don’t Sweat the Conference Talk

  1. It’s funny how terms like “imposter syndrome” came into being right after the passage of affirmative action laws.

    I can’t relate to people who get nervous when presenting their research. Dude, it’s YOUR work. By definition, nobody knows more about it more than you do. Why are you freaking out??

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    1. I’ve seen whole careers come to naught because people turned conferences into the main unit of their scholarly output. And it’s a mistake. Nobody cares. It’s better not to go at all than to see it as very important.

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