10 ms·

Early-Career Setbacks Can Set You Up for Success

77 points by Kaibeezy 7y ago

Kaibeezy 7y ago
failures in the first phases of your career may mean you can come back stronger than those who never stumbled
- rozularen 7y ago
  it even sounds logical and obvious for some but it isn't for many at least in my group of friends
- war1025 7y ago
  Similar to plants that live in too controlled of micro-climates. They don't develop the correct stress hardening and fall over / wilt at the first sign of normal weather.
b3kart 7y ago
Non-paywalled: http://archive.is/bUZBu http://archive.is/bUZBu
ipoopatwork 7y ago
Well duh. If you're barely getting the grant, you're not going to be in a place where you can impress people and progress very well. If you miss the grant by a bit, you'll find somewhere where you're a better fit. It's not the setback that helps
- samvher 7y ago
  We find that the near-miss group naturally received significantly less NIH funding in the first five years following treatment, averaging $0.29 million less per person (Fig. 2d, t-test p-value < 0.05, Cohen’s d = 0.28), which is consistent with prior studies. Yet the funding difference between the two groups disappeared in the second five-year period (Fig. 2d, t-test p-value > 0.1, Cohen’s d = 0.02). From the paper [0]. This does not look like the rejects found similar opportunities in more suitable places. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12189-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12189-3
non-entity 7y ago
Encouraging, but I'll remain cautious about this. Regardless of early career stumbles I'll be successful by the average person's idea, but I doubt I'll be considered successful by my own ideals or by that of many people here, for example.
cryptica 7y ago
That seems pretty obvious because anyone who succeeds on the first try just got lucky. Reality is very complex and it takes years of failure to understand the full complexity of anything. Sometimes you just try something and it just happens to work the first time; this doesn't mean that you know what you're doing. If you succeed too early, it can give you false confidence about your abilities and this makes you unwilling to accept advice from 'unsuccessful' people who have a very thorough understanding of what's going on. People who've endured constant failure throughout their careers and who never gave up are often way more talented than successful people who've only experienced a few failures. Failure is relentless. It's the default outcome for essentially every action, no matter how well it was planned beforehand. There is almost always something completely unexpected which pops out of nowhere and ruins everything. Small things which pop out of nowhere to ruin everything are extremely common. When you have a lot of capital, you don't even notice those, but if don't have capital and you've failed many times before, you learn to operate at a different level; the essence of your strategy is not about looking at numbers and making broad, obvious projections, instead, your strategy is centered around anticipating and mitigating all possible small unexpected things that can go wrong.
- robocat 7y ago
  > When you have a lot of capital just causes a different set of failure modes (cocaine burnout, celeb wannabe, reality shock, etcetera). > Failure is relentless Very true.
sys_64738 7y ago
Absolutely. Better to do a startup early and see it fail than make the same mistake mid-career. It showed me startups are a mug’s game.
- ecf 7y ago
  Yeah it’s best to get the lesson early on that venture-backed startups are 99% of the time just smoke and mirrors.
- Bootwizard 7y ago
  What about bootstrapped startups vs. VC backed startups?
empath75 7y ago
This article seems to be drawing a very broad feel-good conclusion from a very weak foundation.
snagglegaggle 7y ago
licks finger and holds it up Nope, still screwed.
thiago_fm 7y ago
I don't agree with this article and this culture of making failure a beautiful thing. A Failure is a failure. When people fail, a lot of things go bad. Many of them get depressive, they go through a lot. It's like saying that having abusive parents make you a strong person. Completely bullshit. I doubt this has any positive effect on "setting somebody up" for success. It is much easier to be successful if you don't mess it up. For most of the world, people aren't even allowed to fail once.
- 8ytecoder 7y ago
  I agree failure is a failure but not that it's bad. Failure is neither good nor bad by itself. I think it's important to learn that a failure is not a reason to hate yourself - which is what usually feeds the depression. It's not constructive to dwell on the failure. It's necessary in fact to find out what the learning is and then see what strategies exist to minimize harm. That's not glorifying it in anyway. Falling down, for example, is not a beautiful thing but it's imperative to learn to get up - otherwise, what's the alternative? The article seem to make the claim that setbacks train your mind to accept failure as part of the process and not treat it any differently. What's wrong in that? There's no need to be a contrarian in everything.
  - nishantvyas 7y ago
    +1. Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is “I am bad.” Guilt is “I did something bad.” - Dr Brene Brown. Failure treated as a guilt may lead to learning and be fixed, but if treated as Shame may lead to depression.
    - TuringNYC 7y ago
      I get your point, but this is a bit simplistic. One also has to realize when a game is full out rigged — you did your best (perhaps the best) and you still failed because perhaps success wasn’t allowed for you. Then you need to learn to play a different game. Sort of like when college failures end up as leaders and go into tell everyone to work hard because obviously that is what is stopping everyone else /s
solinent 7y ago
People who fail are also bigger risk takers, I wonder if this has any effect. I've failed a couple times already and I always come back stronger. It seems like it is because I take risks that keep things growing. If I wasn't a risk taker, I'd probably be where I started, and even though maybe I'd be happier, I'd be much less successful.
m0zg 7y ago
Early career setbacks are also likely to set you up for much lower lifetime earnings. Like it or not, how much more you will earn in your next job depends on how much you were making in your previous one. So does how much more you will earn after you get promoted (which happens more often early on). In negotiation this is called "anchoring". So it _really_, _really_ pays, quite literally, to find, get, and hold the highest paying job available right out of school. How much you make is a powerful signaling mechanism that (if you have a modicum of skill to back it up) utterly dominates everything else, and has a compounding effect over the rest of your career. You will be able to afford to not care about money as much 10-20 years in when you're all set, but initially it's very important that you get the highest paying job you can.
- rafiki6 7y ago
  While I really can't argue with the "get the highest paying job you can as early as you can", there are also many market dynamics at play and quite frankly your own ability to navigate and bluff and take risks are a major part of it. But yes, on average I would say, aim for the highest paying job you can.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    >> navigate and bluff and take risks All of this is _much_ easier to do when you're pulling down six figures right out of school.
- oarabbus_ 7y ago
  >Early career setbacks are also likely to set you up for much lower lifetime earnings. Like it or not, how much more you will earn in your next job depends on how much you were making in your previous one. So does how much more you will earn after you get promoted (which happens more often early on). In negotiation this is called "anchoring". So it _really_, _really_ pays, quite literally, to find, get, and hold the highest paying job available right out of school. I graduated in 2012 with a biomedical engineering degree, and the vast majority of my collegiate graduating class made more than me right out of school, including the non-engineers; I worked as a server/busboy and also as a cashier for about 6 months while constantly applying for jobs. In case you're wondering, I did have internship experience most summers in college, nothing stellar, but it was on there. I will say that 2012/2013 was an absolutely awful time to be a non-CS fresh grad in the job market. I hadn't imagined working as a server after completing an engineering degree, and the difficulty I faced in getting industry roles led me to immediately apply for a MS program. My first "relevant"/industry job was a contract role at a medical device company that paid $22/hr in an extremely high COL area (SF Bay Area). I was likely in the bottom 15th percentile of earnings at this point. 3 years later, I'd worked my way up to ~70k annualized salary. All while doing the MS program part time. Today, sure there are plenty of people whose earnings far exceed mine, but I'd be surprised if I wasn't at least in the 80th-90th percentile of both salary and lifetime earnings of my graduating cohort. Now, obviously you won't hear any objection from me against finding, getting, and holding the highest paying job out of school. But I certainly question if it's really as important as people claim it is. And I will say I don't know if I'd be earning as much as I do today, and I'm not sure I'd have a MS degree, had I landed a better, higher paying role out of college.
gigatexal 7y ago
Failure can be a powerful teacher.
jl2718 7y ago
Irresponsible sanguine BS. Path dependence is huge. Family problems, leaving school, bad boss, bad partner, spiteful interviewer, health/injury problems: these things can knock you out of the “high-achiever” game very quickly. Comebacks are rare and you can’t go back to being “high-potential”. This game has less to do with ability than mass psychology, like stock trading or politics. Hardships are a nice flair to your success story, but only if they come before stepping into the competitive part of the pipeline, or after you already made it out. The middle is brutal and unforgiving. The other option is to get out of that game, stop living in the cult of personality, and focus your life on exchanging money for direct value to the customer ( i.e. indiehacker). This seems much harder than peddling a resume in exchange for salary or investment or a professorship or whatever.
- war1025 7y ago
  On the other hand, they do give you perspective and help you realize that maybe being "high potential" isn't all its cracked up to be.
- majormajor 7y ago
  So what would the "responsible" message be, in your book? "If you get unlucky and have bad boss, family problem, health problem, etc, too bad, sucks to be you!"? Cause trust me, people who have bad stuff happen to them already know it sucks.
  - jl2718 7y ago
    This is a good point. I don't know. I suppose there are two options: 1) stick with it 2) do something else. I have heard of cognitive biases in both directions, and I don't know which is generally stronger* in most people. Probably the best advice is to seek better advice from someone that knows what it takes to win. *You could probably study this with outcomes of job switching and divorces. I'm not sure how though...
    - tracer4201 7y ago
      Do something else is great advice. My manager was a great people manager and would generally rank high in terms of emotional intelligence (imo), but getting into details and weeds was not his strength. When the problem we are trying to solve requires a decision maker to remove abstractions and deal head on with complexity, he would do the opposite. He would avoid the tough conversations - Every. Single. Time. My boss saw his reports (me specifically in this case) as the abstraction. It removed complexity from his plate and made his job easier, but honestly, his poor decision making set me up to fail. I did my best, but when it was clear that I need management support and I won’t receive it, I had no other choice. I left. :)
yellowapple 7y ago
Worth noting that the paper is specific to science careers, while the Times article tries to extrapolate it to careers in general regardless of field.
tehjoker 7y ago
Love how we play a game where only about 1 in 5 people tops can "win" or suffer harshly.
oarabbus_ 7y ago
Lots of disagreement against this article. I graduated in 2012 with a biomedical engineering degree, and the vast majority of my collegiate graduating class made more than me right out of school, including the non-engineers; I worked as a server/busboy and also as a cashier for about 6 months while constantly applying for jobs. In case you're wondering, I did have internship experience most summers in college, nothing stellar, but it was on there. I will say that 2012/2013 was an absolutely awful time to be a non-CS fresh grad in the job market. I hadn't imagined working as a server after completing an engineering degree, and the difficulty I faced in getting industry roles led me to immediately apply for a MS program. My first "relevant"/industry job was a contract role at a medical device company that paid $22/hr in an extremely high COL area (SF Bay Area). I was likely in the bottom 15th percentile of earnings at this point. 3 years later, I'd worked my way up to ~70k annualized salary. All while doing the MS program part time. Today I'm at a Letter Corp in tech, and while sure there are plenty of people whose earnings far exceed mine, I'd be surprised if I wasn't at least in the 80th-90th percentile of both salary and lifetime earnings of my graduating cohort. Now, obviously you won't hear any objection from me against finding, getting, and holding the highest paying job out of school. But I certainly question if it's really as important as people claim it is. And I will say I don't know if I'd be earning as much as I do today, and I'm not sure I'd have a MS degree, had I landed a better, higher paying role out of college.
- sct202 7y ago
  That's a great story, and I think something a lot of people need to hear things like your story especially for the jump from school to working. I have a friend who basically became a nomad and only recently landed his first professional job, and it seemed like every year he got more anxious and doubtful about himself.
mcguire 7y ago
[Note: I can't read the article. Sorry.] Early-career setbacks can also set back your career permanently. My first job out of college was with Taligent. That did not go well. (Well, there was OS/2 for a short time before that...) Then I worked on the WorkplaceOS/IBM's uKernel. That didn't go well either. Since those first years, I went back to grad school, worked for a university, and got comfortable for far too long. Then I went back to IBM. (Don't do that.) Since then, I have worked for various "enterprise" things and other low-risk, low-reward endeavors. My salary peaked at about $120k. Be careful when you take advice from people who are successful.
mcguire 7y ago
"Setbacks are an integral part of a scientific career, yet little is known about their long-term effects. Here we examine junior scientists applying for National Institutes of Health R01 grants. By focusing on proposals fell just below and just above the funding threshold, we compare near-miss with narrow-win applicants, and find that an early-career setback has powerful, opposing effects. On the one hand, it significantly increases attrition, predicting more than a 10% chance of disappearing permanently from the NIH system. Yet, despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run. Moreover, this performance advantage seems to go beyond a screening mechanism, suggesting early-career setback appears to cause a performance improvement among those who persevere. Overall, these findings are consistent with the concept that “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” which may have broad implications for identifying, training and nurturing junior scientists." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12189-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12189-3
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

77 points by Kaibeezy 7y ago

Kaibeezy 7y ago

failures in the first phases of your career may mean you can come back stronger than those who never stumbled

rozularen 7y ago
it even sounds logical and obvious for some but it isn't for many at least in my group of friends
war1025 7y ago
Similar to plants that live in too controlled of micro-climates. They don't develop the correct stress hardening and fall over / wilt at the first sign of normal weather.

b3kart 7y ago

Non-paywalled: http://archive.is/bUZBu http://archive.is/bUZBu

ipoopatwork 7y ago

Well duh. If you're barely getting the grant, you're not going to be in a place where you can impress people and progress very well. If you miss the grant by a bit, you'll find somewhere where you're a better fit. It's not the setback that helps

samvher 7y ago
We find that the near-miss group naturally received significantly less NIH funding in the first five years following treatment, averaging $0.29 million less per person (Fig. 2d, t-test p-value < 0.05, Cohen’s d = 0.28), which is consistent with prior studies. Yet the funding difference between the two groups disappeared in the second five-year period (Fig. 2d, t-test p-value > 0.1, Cohen’s d = 0.02). From the paper [0]. This does not look like the rejects found similar opportunities in more suitable places. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12189-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12189-3

non-entity 7y ago

Encouraging, but I'll remain cautious about this. Regardless of early career stumbles I'll be successful by the average person's idea, but I doubt I'll be considered successful by my own ideals or by that of many people here, for example.

cryptica 7y ago

That seems pretty obvious because anyone who succeeds on the first try just got lucky. Reality is very complex and it takes years of failure to understand the full complexity of anything. Sometimes you just try something and it just happens to work the first time; this doesn't mean that you know what you're doing. If you succeed too early, it can give you false confidence about your abilities and this makes you unwilling to accept advice from 'unsuccessful' people who have a very thorough understanding of what's going on. People who've endured constant failure throughout their careers and who never gave up are often way more talented than successful people who've only experienced a few failures. Failure is relentless. It's the default outcome for essentially every action, no matter how well it was planned beforehand. There is almost always something completely unexpected which pops out of nowhere and ruins everything. Small things which pop out of nowhere to ruin everything are extremely common. When you have a lot of capital, you don't even notice those, but if don't have capital and you've failed many times before, you learn to operate at a different level; the essence of your strategy is not about looking at numbers and making broad, obvious projections, instead, your strategy is centered around anticipating and mitigating all possible small unexpected things that can go wrong.

robocat 7y ago
> When you have a lot of capital just causes a different set of failure modes (cocaine burnout, celeb wannabe, reality shock, etcetera). > Failure is relentless Very true.

sys_64738 7y ago

Absolutely. Better to do a startup early and see it fail than make the same mistake mid-career. It showed me startups are a mug’s game.

ecf 7y ago
Yeah it’s best to get the lesson early on that venture-backed startups are 99% of the time just smoke and mirrors.
Bootwizard 7y ago
What about bootstrapped startups vs. VC backed startups?

empath75 7y ago

This article seems to be drawing a very broad feel-good conclusion from a very weak foundation.

snagglegaggle 7y ago

licks finger and holds it up Nope, still screwed.

thiago_fm 7y ago

I don't agree with this article and this culture of making failure a beautiful thing. A Failure is a failure. When people fail, a lot of things go bad. Many of them get depressive, they go through a lot. It's like saying that having abusive parents make you a strong person. Completely bullshit. I doubt this has any positive effect on "setting somebody up" for success. It is much easier to be successful if you don't mess it up. For most of the world, people aren't even allowed to fail once.

8ytecoder 7y ago
I agree failure is a failure but not that it's bad. Failure is neither good nor bad by itself. I think it's important to learn that a failure is not a reason to hate yourself - which is what usually feeds the depression. It's not constructive to dwell on the failure. It's necessary in fact to find out what the learning is and then see what strategies exist to minimize harm. That's not glorifying it in anyway. Falling down, for example, is not a beautiful thing but it's imperative to learn to get up - otherwise, what's the alternative? The article seem to make the claim that setbacks train your mind to accept failure as part of the process and not treat it any differently. What's wrong in that? There's no need to be a contrarian in everything.
- nishantvyas 7y ago
  +1. Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is “I am bad.” Guilt is “I did something bad.” - Dr Brene Brown. Failure treated as a guilt may lead to learning and be fixed, but if treated as Shame may lead to depression.
  - TuringNYC 7y ago
    I get your point, but this is a bit simplistic. One also has to realize when a game is full out rigged — you did your best (perhaps the best) and you still failed because perhaps success wasn’t allowed for you. Then you need to learn to play a different game. Sort of like when college failures end up as leaders and go into tell everyone to work hard because obviously that is what is stopping everyone else /s

solinent 7y ago

People who fail are also bigger risk takers, I wonder if this has any effect. I've failed a couple times already and I always come back stronger. It seems like it is because I take risks that keep things growing. If I wasn't a risk taker, I'd probably be where I started, and even though maybe I'd be happier, I'd be much less successful.

m0zg 7y ago

Early career setbacks are also likely to set you up for much lower lifetime earnings. Like it or not, how much more you will earn in your next job depends on how much you were making in your previous one. So does how much more you will earn after you get promoted (which happens more often early on). In negotiation this is called "anchoring". So it _really_, _really_ pays, quite literally, to find, get, and hold the highest paying job available right out of school. How much you make is a powerful signaling mechanism that (if you have a modicum of skill to back it up) utterly dominates everything else, and has a compounding effect over the rest of your career. You will be able to afford to not care about money as much 10-20 years in when you're all set, but initially it's very important that you get the highest paying job you can.

rafiki6 7y ago
While I really can't argue with the "get the highest paying job you can as early as you can", there are also many market dynamics at play and quite frankly your own ability to navigate and bluff and take risks are a major part of it. But yes, on average I would say, aim for the highest paying job you can.
- m0zg 7y ago
  >> navigate and bluff and take risks All of this is _much_ easier to do when you're pulling down six figures right out of school.
oarabbus_ 7y ago
>Early career setbacks are also likely to set you up for much lower lifetime earnings. Like it or not, how much more you will earn in your next job depends on how much you were making in your previous one. So does how much more you will earn after you get promoted (which happens more often early on). In negotiation this is called "anchoring". So it _really_, _really_ pays, quite literally, to find, get, and hold the highest paying job available right out of school. I graduated in 2012 with a biomedical engineering degree, and the vast majority of my collegiate graduating class made more than me right out of school, including the non-engineers; I worked as a server/busboy and also as a cashier for about 6 months while constantly applying for jobs. In case you're wondering, I did have internship experience most summers in college, nothing stellar, but it was on there. I will say that 2012/2013 was an absolutely awful time to be a non-CS fresh grad in the job market. I hadn't imagined working as a server after completing an engineering degree, and the difficulty I faced in getting industry roles led me to immediately apply for a MS program. My first "relevant"/industry job was a contract role at a medical device company that paid $22/hr in an extremely high COL area (SF Bay Area). I was likely in the bottom 15th percentile of earnings at this point. 3 years later, I'd worked my way up to ~70k annualized salary. All while doing the MS program part time. Today, sure there are plenty of people whose earnings far exceed mine, but I'd be surprised if I wasn't at least in the 80th-90th percentile of both salary and lifetime earnings of my graduating cohort. Now, obviously you won't hear any objection from me against finding, getting, and holding the highest paying job out of school. But I certainly question if it's really as important as people claim it is. And I will say I don't know if I'd be earning as much as I do today, and I'm not sure I'd have a MS degree, had I landed a better, higher paying role out of college.

gigatexal 7y ago

Failure can be a powerful teacher.

jl2718 7y ago

Irresponsible sanguine BS. Path dependence is huge. Family problems, leaving school, bad boss, bad partner, spiteful interviewer, health/injury problems: these things can knock you out of the “high-achiever” game very quickly. Comebacks are rare and you can’t go back to being “high-potential”. This game has less to do with ability than mass psychology, like stock trading or politics. Hardships are a nice flair to your success story, but only if they come before stepping into the competitive part of the pipeline, or after you already made it out. The middle is brutal and unforgiving. The other option is to get out of that game, stop living in the cult of personality, and focus your life on exchanging money for direct value to the customer ( i.e. indiehacker). This seems much harder than peddling a resume in exchange for salary or investment or a professorship or whatever.

war1025 7y ago
On the other hand, they do give you perspective and help you realize that maybe being "high potential" isn't all its cracked up to be.
majormajor 7y ago
So what would the "responsible" message be, in your book? "If you get unlucky and have bad boss, family problem, health problem, etc, too bad, sucks to be you!"? Cause trust me, people who have bad stuff happen to them already know it sucks.
- jl2718 7y ago
  This is a good point. I don't know. I suppose there are two options: 1) stick with it 2) do something else. I have heard of cognitive biases in both directions, and I don't know which is generally stronger* in most people. Probably the best advice is to seek better advice from someone that knows what it takes to win. *You could probably study this with outcomes of job switching and divorces. I'm not sure how though...
  - tracer4201 7y ago
    Do something else is great advice. My manager was a great people manager and would generally rank high in terms of emotional intelligence (imo), but getting into details and weeds was not his strength. When the problem we are trying to solve requires a decision maker to remove abstractions and deal head on with complexity, he would do the opposite. He would avoid the tough conversations - Every. Single. Time. My boss saw his reports (me specifically in this case) as the abstraction. It removed complexity from his plate and made his job easier, but honestly, his poor decision making set me up to fail. I did my best, but when it was clear that I need management support and I won’t receive it, I had no other choice. I left. :)

yellowapple 7y ago

Worth noting that the paper is specific to science careers, while the Times article tries to extrapolate it to careers in general regardless of field.

tehjoker 7y ago

Love how we play a game where only about 1 in 5 people tops can "win" or suffer harshly.

oarabbus_ 7y ago

Lots of disagreement against this article. I graduated in 2012 with a biomedical engineering degree, and the vast majority of my collegiate graduating class made more than me right out of school, including the non-engineers; I worked as a server/busboy and also as a cashier for about 6 months while constantly applying for jobs. In case you're wondering, I did have internship experience most summers in college, nothing stellar, but it was on there. I will say that 2012/2013 was an absolutely awful time to be a non-CS fresh grad in the job market. I hadn't imagined working as a server after completing an engineering degree, and the difficulty I faced in getting industry roles led me to immediately apply for a MS program. My first "relevant"/industry job was a contract role at a medical device company that paid $22/hr in an extremely high COL area (SF Bay Area). I was likely in the bottom 15th percentile of earnings at this point. 3 years later, I'd worked my way up to ~70k annualized salary. All while doing the MS program part time. Today I'm at a Letter Corp in tech, and while sure there are plenty of people whose earnings far exceed mine, I'd be surprised if I wasn't at least in the 80th-90th percentile of both salary and lifetime earnings of my graduating cohort. Now, obviously you won't hear any objection from me against finding, getting, and holding the highest paying job out of school. But I certainly question if it's really as important as people claim it is. And I will say I don't know if I'd be earning as much as I do today, and I'm not sure I'd have a MS degree, had I landed a better, higher paying role out of college.

sct202 7y ago
That's a great story, and I think something a lot of people need to hear things like your story especially for the jump from school to working. I have a friend who basically became a nomad and only recently landed his first professional job, and it seemed like every year he got more anxious and doubtful about himself.

mcguire 7y ago

[Note: I can't read the article. Sorry.] Early-career setbacks can also set back your career permanently. My first job out of college was with Taligent. That did not go well. (Well, there was OS/2 for a short time before that...) Then I worked on the WorkplaceOS/IBM's uKernel. That didn't go well either. Since those first years, I went back to grad school, worked for a university, and got comfortable for far too long. Then I went back to IBM. (Don't do that.) Since then, I have worked for various "enterprise" things and other low-risk, low-reward endeavors. My salary peaked at about $120k. Be careful when you take advice from people who are successful.

mcguire 7y ago

"Setbacks are an integral part of a scientific career, yet little is known about their long-term effects. Here we examine junior scientists applying for National Institutes of Health R01 grants. By focusing on proposals fell just below and just above the funding threshold, we compare near-miss with narrow-win applicants, and find that an early-career setback has powerful, opposing effects. On the one hand, it significantly increases attrition, predicting more than a 10% chance of disappearing permanently from the NIH system. Yet, despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run. Moreover, this performance advantage seems to go beyond a screening mechanism, suggesting early-career setback appears to cause a performance improvement among those who persevere. Overall, these findings are consistent with the concept that “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” which may have broad implications for identifying, training and nurturing junior scientists." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12189-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12189-3

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]