Opinions tell you a lot about a person; here are mine.
Where did 2020 go?
Determining your own value is a terrible, messy, uncomfortable process.
Do it anyway.
You might be at the middle of the valley of your Dunning-Kruger curve, but what you've got to realize is that the middle is not a bad place to be.
(It also appears that the upwards slope out of my personal Dunning-Kruger curve happens to be covered in oil.)
Productivity does not cause value.
What causes value?
You will never be as prepared as you could be. That's okay. You're doing just fine anyway.
The period after a long stint of work where you are motivationless and not accomplishing anything -- you need that. That's the healthy coping with burnout because you had been working REALLY HARD. Allow yourself time to rest and you'll find that you'll become productive again when you're ready.
Uncomfortable conversations are inevitable. Seeing how the other party acts days or weeks afterwards will reveal how they really feel about the situation.
If you call someone on something be aware that people have many different ways of showing that they feel guilty.
Possible Future Paper Title: The Role of Implicit versus Explicit Use of Metacognitive Strategies in Conventional Tutoring and Intelligent Tutoring Systems
With my students I find that it is sometimes helpful to point out key metacognitive strategies while doing tutoring that they can apply when I'm not around. One such strategy was that the textbook expected them to use the same strategy for all of the problems of the chapter, so the goal was to rephrase the question so that such a strategy would be useful. This begs the question: what role do metacognitive strategies play in tutoring and when does making them explicit (rather than just assumed) matter?
Breaks are necessary and increase productivity.
While it's fun to have everyone think that you're a wizard doing something that you considered to be pretty basic, that also means that no body is ever going to offer to help you because they won't believe that what you did is a learnable skill.
Your work -- the time and effort you put in to doing something for someone else -- is something you need to be compensated for doing.
The first thing that I launched this blog with was "Try writing out instructions for someone else to do what you do; you'll quickly learn whether you're doing enough or whether you could do more." Then I realized just how much I do for absolutely no benefit to me at all. Kind of a late epiphany that if you do work you are due compensation for your labor.
Silence in a conversation is not a bad thing. Let them figure out how to respond in silence.
Being smart and being ignorant are not mutually exclusive, and that's not a bad thing.
The way this was first phrased to me was that there are four kinds of things: things you know, things you are learning, things you don't know, and things you don't know that you don't know. Practically, this has impacted me because I know that there are a lot of things that I don't know, and because of that I undervalue what I do know. Being smart and being ignorant are not mutually exclusive. You can be a bright, wonderful, intelligent individual and still have a lot to learn, and that is OKAY. Don't lose sight of that. No one knows everything, and even the people who look like they do are still learning.
People appreciate you more if you can get your point across clearly and concisely. Practice doing that.
People love talking about themselves; capitalize on that. Ask more questions and don't interrupt them when they answer. Let there be silence while they think of how to respond. You'll be surprised how much you learn by being quiet.
And talk to the person you recognize as "one of the quiet ones". You don't know if they have been listening and have something good to input or have been waiting for someone to include them.
Talk less, smile more.
If you're a leader, you're there to support the people you're leading, not the other way around.
It can be both, though more traditionally leader supports the team and the team supports the project and the project supports the leader, I think.
Know where your comfort zone is and know when to leave it.
The things you have handled poorly, figure out how you could have handled them better and then MOVE ON. You cannot change the future by living in the past.
Keep a running list of things that you've handled well. Most people know what situations they handled poorly, but few people keep in mind the times they really did things right.
Recognize your own growth: how much you've grown and how you can grow from here.
Take the time to learn from experts in fields other than your own. You'll be surprised just how much you learn.
I've recently gotten into watching recordings of the Game Development Conference (GDC). At this point I've attended two conferences ever: RSoA and ABRCMS. Neither of these are "in my field". I am neither an alcohol researcher nor a biomedical researcher, yet I presented posters at both of these conferences. This experience is both making me a more interdisciplinary researcher and because I am an interdisciplinary researcher.
One of the core things that we teach children is to try to see things from someone else's point of view, but once we get to college and start our own research that seems to vanish. All of a sudden, we are only concerned with how OUR field views things. This is totally reasonable... to an extent. You have to have focus to be successful, and if your vision is too broad, you won't be successful. That being said, you don't have to change your Entire project in order to incorporate views from other fields.
As a psychology researcher, how can I see things from a statistics viewpoint?
As a statistician, how can I see things from a psychology researcher's viewpoint?
As someone who has both of these viewpoints, how can I see things from the viewpoint of someone else?
Asking these questions has led me to reading things that I normally wouldn't read, investigating different disciplines, and listening to people talk about what they're passionate about sharing. If you're reading this, I challenge you to try it! Watch a GDC video with an interesting title, ask someone you know what they're passionate about, take a class in something that you wouldn't normally consider. Get out of your comfort zone, if only a little bit.
Try writing out instructions for someone else to do what you do; you'll quickly learn whether you're doing enough or whether you could do more.
One of my most requested tasks is to write "Idiot-proof How To" guides for the various things that I know how to do. Most of these tasks I've picked up without really thinking about it and maintain without much fuss. Each time, my first thought is "Sure I can write that up for you, it's really not that difficult!" until I'm done typing it up and I realize that I've typed eight pages and not only am I not done yet, but I still haven't added pictures to any of it. As someone who has the absolute worst sense of how much I accomplish, this is a pretty good metric. When I think about what my tasks used to be when I first started doing research, it would have taken half a page to describe how to do my role. Seeing (and acknowledging) that growth is important and a great reminder of just how much I do now.