Clarissa's Blog

I once invited a kick-ass speaker to campus to give a talk on academic productivity. He gave tons of useful suggestions that I still use all the time.

When we were leaving the event, a colleague who’d spent 20 years complaining that she couldn’t go up for promotion because she didn’t know how to get herself together and publish anything drawled, “What a disappointing event. I thought he was going to say something interesting and instead he said we need to write every day.”

The colleague retired last year without ever going up for promotion.

People don’t want practicable solutions. They want magic. “How about I write nothing but still get published a lot?” That would be great productivity method, right? Pity it doesn’t exist.

It’s the same when you tell people you can go to college for free or extremely cheaply. They interpret it as meaning that you can go to any college for free and have a TV lifestyle there. But you can’t. For free, you can go to a local public college, live at home and work two crappy jobs. There won’t be any magic but you can get pretty great results.