This article caught my attention because I came across it on the same morning I submitted to a journal a paper that I co-authored with a colleague . Nothing particularly unique about that for an academic librarian. What might be of interest is that I first had the idea for this article in 2005 and started working on it with my colleague in 2006. You might be asking how it could possibly take over three years to complete an article about anything, and I tend to be asking myself that same question. It’s not that my colleague and I were procrastinating all these years. It’s just that other projects came up here and there (like a book), and between working and blogging and other stuff, it just ended up taking a while longer than we expected. Of course, with any scholarly article where it involves data collection and analysis, you might be talking two years as a matter of course.
The point is that authoring takes grit – especially scholarly research. Finding good ideas worth writing about is a challenge, but just getting from the idea stage to the “is this feasible and how will it get done” stage takes time. And there will no doubt be roadblocks along the way, such as finding out your IRB requires you to sit through six hours of training modules even though you’ll never conduct medical research. Sure, it would be easy to just give up, but as the article points out:
grit isn’t simply about the willingness to work hard. Instead, it’s about setting a specific long-term goal and doing whatever it takes until the goal has been reached. It’s always much easier to give up, but people with grit can keep going.
So even though it took a considerable length of time to complete and submit the article, it was a matter of having that single long-term goal. We were committed to getting that manuscript submitted in 2009. Finally we did it. I’ve always been a believer that persistence pays off, especially in higher education. That comes primarily from time spent studying Cohen, March and Olsen’s Garbage Can Theory of Decision Making in my higher education program. That theory (it’s been awhile but I think I can still explain it) likens decision making in higher education to a garbage can into which all sorts of possible solutions are dumped. With many academic offices competing for allocations, the solutions stay in the can until they are attached to a specific problem. Where this connects to grit is that the experts advocated being persistent and that over time your solution would attach itself to some new problem. All one needed to do is wait things out, and keep promoting a particular solution.
Research using the Garbage Can Theory as a theoretical framework has shown that in higher education institutions it can in fact predict how the decision-making process will often play out – even in the academic library. So if you have an idea for a new program or service that your administrator or colleagues rejected – don’t give up. If you want it you’ll need grit. Be persistent. I don’t mean you should become a broken record constantly promoting your ideas. Rather, let them brew for a while slightly below the decision-making surface of the organization. Then look for opportunities when you think there might be more interest in or openness to your ideas – perhaps six months or a year later. Then the solutions in the garbage can may be a better fit with the current problems in your library. Whether its a research project or a library project, persistence usually will pay off.
See, I’ve been waiting through five years of blogging for ACRLog to find a way to mention the Garbage Can Theory of Decision Making – and I finally did it. After you’ve read one article roughly 37 times, you feel compelled to work it into a blog post. Talk about grit!