Reader Anthony left a great comment to one of my posts on academic rejection. The comment expresses feelings that many young academics, including myself, often experience. Here is an excerpt from the comment that you can read in full here:

After 11 straight rejections I think I am done. I have been submitting papers to peer-reviewed journals since May 2009 and until today nothing has worked out. My tenure is now in serious danger. The point is that I do not want to fool myself any further,the brutal truth is that I am just not good enough. It is normal to find excuses, to complain about the peer-review system, but probably it is just me. . . There is something very very sad about all of this. I am a very hard-working and honest person. I work as hard as I can and put all of myself into what I do. Nonetheless, it is not enough. Getting published is not about how hard you work, it is about how clever and original you are. . . My struggle now is to reach the point is which I am truly totally honest. I am not looking to a strategic way to consider my situation, I only want the truth. A part of me still hopes that may be I am good enough. This part scares me; I feel this part is the voice of my delusion and dishonesty. I feel that this voice is the voice of arrogance, the arrogance of a person who refuses to see his limitation and to say: I am not good.

Thank you for sharing, Anthony. I think I know how you feel, even though my problem is a little different from yours. I think I am clever and original but not very hard-working, so the clever ideas I have always end up delivered in a shoddy, careless fashion. It’s very hard to figure out on one’s own whether one is good enough in research. Maybe let’s try to figure this out together.

First, a few questions:

1) Have you ever gotten published? How many times, when and where?
2) These 11 rejections, how many articles are we talking about?
3) When you are writing or working on your research, how does that make you feel? Like it’s something you do out of a sense of obligation? Or do you enjoy the process?
4) Have you asked senior colleagues in your field to provide feedback?

I don’t know what field you are in but if you are in Humanities or Social Sciences, I can recommend an academic who could look at your work and tell you objectively whether it is hopeless or not. This is somebody who keeps publishing academic books that get extremely high reviews and that come out every 15 minutes. 🙂 Here is his blog. He helps people improve their writing and get organized in their research as a side-line.

And this is an article from another highly successful academic who got more rejections than you.

And this is about all those academics and athletes who do everything and achieve all of their successes effortlessly.

I honestly don’t think you can decide on your own if you are good enough. (“You” here is not personal, of course, I include myself, too). You need feedback from people who know your field and are successful in it. After they tell you whether your stuff is worthless or not, you can start figuring out what it is you are doing wrong.

It’s crucial to ask people who will be able to be brutally honest for feedback. It’s no use asking friends and people who are close to you because they will not tell you the truth for fear of hurting your feelings. Too much damage has been done to me and too much time stolen from me by well-meaning, kind, caring folks who kept praising my writing in order to be “nice.” I believed them because I’m not a native speaker of English and I simply relied on the opinions of these nice native speakers. Until finally an honest friend said, “I’m sorry but are you aware that your writing is really bad?” Until the day I die, I will be grateful to this wonderful person who helped me so much by being honest.

I don’t know a single leading academic who doesn’t have a bunch of rejections to their name. But I also realize that sometimes you just choose a profession (a relationship, a friendship, a pursuit, a hobby) that is wrong for you. You keep putting your best into it but it simply isn’t there. In that case, when the realization begins to dawn that you might have made a mistake and will have to pull out of this field (profession, relationship, etc.), I think you need to start preparing a backup plan as soon as possible. Withdrawing from a field after investing years of your life into it can be crushing. There needs to be something else to soften the blow on your self-esteem.

Many academics are reading this blog. Please share your insights and stories with Anthony and me. When should a person give up pursuing a dream? When should you say, “I’m done. This obviously isn’t for me, so I should go do something else with my life”?