The myth of failure
Feeling like a failure for leaving academia and what to do about it
Those who never fail are those who never try. ~Ilka Chase, Am. actress and novelist
If you decide to leave academia, you may have to deal with feeling like a failure. Like the road you were on was washed out in a storm and now you’re not sure which direction to go. This can be true whether you decide to leave before finishing a degree, or if you have successfully finished and defended your PhD. Last month, I posted about the necessity of grieving when you leave academia. Here’s the link to listen to the talk, “Moving on: Dealing with the emotional aspects of leaving academia.”
Even if you consciously choose to quit on your own terms before finishing a PhD, you may still find yourself feeling like a failure. I did, and I had to fight through these feelings. Just contemplating leaving made my heart constrict with emotion. There were multiple factors involved in my decision to leave, but eventually, the overriding one was, “I really don’t want to do this.” And it was incredibly difficult to admit that to myself, even though staying would have literally cost me money, time and health.
If you quit academia after finishing the degree, and can’t get a job, you may be beating yourself up unmercifully. Stop being so unkind to yourself. One of the more insidious myths floating around is that getting an academic tenure track job is within your control if you just try hard enough. It’s just not true. In an April 2019 Chronicle of Higher Education piece, Daniel Bessner and Michael Brenes write, “The academic job market is abysmal. To even call it a ‘market’ is an exaggeration; it’s more like a slaughterhouse.” The inability to get a job is not about you. It’s structural. However, that doesn’t mean it won’t hurt when you finally let go of your own dream of a tenure track job in academia.
There are many ways the failure story may appear in your life. Chris Humphreys, now the owner of Jobs on Toast, wrote a post in March 2014 describing his own failure story:
Chris is a bright and promising scholar but he can’t seem to get a permanent academic job. It’s such a shame. Maybe he didn’t come across well enough at interviews or have good enough research plans in the right areas. He’s having to quit academia now and go and do something else now to earn money to support his family. All those years of hard work, what a waste, what a loss.
It is your opinion that matters
You may have someone you know, express how sorry they feel that you failed in your academic job search, without any knowledge of your real situation. Usually, those are the people who have absolutely no comprehension of the difficulty of getting academic employment, and are the ones most likely to say something like, “You studied for how many years? And you still can’t get a job?” Definitely salt in the wound if you are already feeling a bit fragile. What can be scary is if you find yourself believing someone else’s story about why you “failed.” Actually, just getting into graduate school means you are a success. Only 1-2% of our population even go to graduate school.
For people that stay in academia, seeing those that do not stay as the losers can be psychologically important to them. Especially if they are one of the many that is barely scraping by financially and stressed to a near breaking point with their workload.
Failure is inevitable in life. If you think about it, at least 99% of all science experiments are failures. That’s precisely how we learn new information.
Here are just a few people that failed many times before succeeding: Abraham Lincoln lost election after election before he won one; Oprah Winfrey was fired from her first TV job; Michael Jordan often says he has missed more shots than he has successfully made; J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter was rejected 12 times before being accepted by Bloomsbury, at that time a small and very new publisher. Not to mention hockey star Wayne Gretzky’s famous aphorism, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
It may help to think of your old life in academia as a failed experiment and move on.
What to do about the failure story
It’s time to change your story
You need to feel empowered and excited about the decision to leave academia. On your own terms.
Stories are powerful. There is some interesting research on the ability to tell stories as something unique to human learning. Stories can describe the past and predict the future. They allow us to try out scenarios that have not yet come to pass, which can help us when something we imagine actually happens in real time. Sort of like learning to drive a car in a simulator. Or practicing piano on a piece of cardboard.
If you are having a hard time rewriting your story, you may need someone outside you to help. It’s hard to see the whole egg from the inside of it.
Here are 7 questions to ask yourself:
- If you flipped the failure story on its head and told it as “I am a success,” what would that story be?
- What would your story look like to someone outside your life?
- What are the obstacles the protagonist in your story has to overcome? How does that happen? I had a client once who felt like the path to an academic job was strewn with boulders on an uphill climb; once she imagined getting off the mountain, she found it was easy to kick the boulders out of the way and walk downhill.
- What would you have other people take away from the story of your life so far? The willingness to experiment might actually become part of the tale.
- How about incorporating the time in academia in your story as part of your overall life plan? My father went to law school and discovered he hated the practice of law. But he loved the challenge of running a small family business. Whenever anyone asked him about why he didn’t use his law degree, he would say, “Oh, but I do, every day. It’s extremely useful for understanding contracts—and signing letters as an attorney has often gotten me much faster results.” So, he’s a man with a law degree, not a lawyer. You can create the same kind of story for yourself about your own degree. You have a degree, but you are not your degree.
- What about explaining you are now changing career direction, but it comes very directly from your previous experience? “My original goal was to study the chemistry of opioid addiction, but in the process, I realized I was more interested in how government policies can be crafted to alleviate people suffering addiction.” If you have a degree in neuroscience or chemistry, so much the better. The degree can add weight to the opinions and expertise you are offering.
- Can you tell the story from the point of view of skills learned in graduate school that can be used elsewhere? There are at least five big ones that leap to mind: the ability to communicate complex ideas, to collaborate with people holding differing views, to present numbers in an understandable way, the capacity to imagine new solutions to old problems, and being skilled at using digital tools.
The point is to find a new affirmative story about where you have been and where you are going.
That’s how you turn the failure story around.
Tags: academia, academic, attitude, career, change, happiness, happiness at work, transition
Hi, Hillary:
Your post about feeling like a failure for leaving academia was right on the mark! Beyond academia, what you wrote can be applied to any career divorce one goes through.
Your point about the pitfalls of buying into other peoples’ stories about why you “failed” is particularly poignant. And adding to the discouraging remarks said directly to you, there’s also no shortage of indirect narratives that can quickly wilt your career search enthusiasm: Headhunters and job postings implying that only superstars “walking on water” need apply. Note: A headhunter once asked if my current employer would “have a stroke” if I left. I replied, “Not sure. But would their having a mild heart attack suffice?”
Of course, there’s also the ubiquitous overheard conversations from disgruntled Starbucks patrons that magically ignite any job-hunting fears you might be harboring — and the government and media statistics attesting to how our economy and employment levels are booming. In absorbing this information, care must be taken to not succumb to thinking, “My gosh, how can I be struggling during such robust times?”
I really appreciate the “7 Questions” you advised us to ask for transforming the negatives that may come our way. This seems like a sound strategy, and makes me hunger to learn other tactics I can employ along these lines.
Again Hillary, thank you for your fine posting!
Thanks so much, Jeff!
I really do believe it’s super-hard not to buy into someone else’s narrative. Everyone’s situation is unique to them. And news stories only tell part of the tale: there may be a robust economy, but it is largely due to growth in “service” sector of low-paying jobs. And higher education is under attack from every sector you can imagine, which does not help.
As always, I wish you all the best,
Hillary