“You have to stop looking for external validation or else you’ll never truly be happy.”
That’s something I hear a lot. I’m always a little bit confused by it, because it contradicts every bit of my experience. But it does sound like the right kind of thing to say, and I can’t deny the possibility that some people (or many people) can do some internal work and become confident. By and large, however, I don’t think that’s how it works.
Arguably the most important skill of a professional adult is the ability to take feedback and act accordingly. That is, if my supervisor tells me that my draft isn’t good, I take that advice to mean that… it isn’t good. It would be weird for me to say “but I don’t care about what other people think; *I know in my heart* that it’s good”. This doesn’t mean, of course, that I should also conclude that this draft is unsalvageable, but I should conclude that it’s bad. If all my papers have received similar feedback, then it really isn’t that big of a jump to conclude that: all my papers are bad; I don’t write good philosophy papers; I’m probably not very good at philosophy.
Something I’ve heard a lot in academia is that we should not identify ourselves with our work and that we shouldn’t conclude, just because our work is invalidated, that we are bad people. My problem with this is that that’s not really the problem. I’m not depressed because I think I’m a bad person. I’m depressed because I think I’m bad at philosophy and I don’t want to be bad at philosophy because I want to be a successful philosopher. (<- this isn’t me calling for help; I used to think this but not anymore as I’ll explain later.) So, the problem isn’t that I’m conflating my job with my being but that I’ve been told that I have failed at something I hold dear. Telling me to stop holding it dear just sounds like the wrong way to go about it.
Problem stands that academics (and other people) are sometimes too harsh on themselves and falsely think that they have failed or are unsalvageably bad at something when they in fact are not. What to do?
I felt insecure with my philosophical ability throughout my master’s. And I had every reason to be — I didn’t preform well in my undergraduate philosophy classes and I didn’t even want to do philosophy when I started my master’s. It would be weird if I were super confident at something I hadn’t spent much effort in and had consistently gotten mediocre feedback. Of course, I had improved throughout my master’s years, but it’s hard to judge by how much. When I decided to apply to PhD programs, I made a deal with myself: if I get into a good program, I would stop doubting my ability to do philosophy. I then got into a good program; and I have not doubted my philosophical ability since.
Two caveats with this: 1, if I had not gotten into a program, I would have concluded that I was not “cut out” for philosophy and stopped trying. This was probably neither rational nor healthy, but then I’m not trying to show off my superior mental health here. 2, many people probably don’t have the same kind of cognitive control as I do, and so this wouldn’t have worked for them.
Still, the point is that it’s much easier to convince myself I’m not terrible when there’s external evidence that tells me I’m actually good.
Similarly, I stopped doubting my writing ability when, shortly after my candidacy exam in my third year, a faculty member whom I’ve never worked with walked into my office unprompted and told me he was very impressed by my paper. He liked how it was written even though he didn’t especially care for the topic. He just wanted me to know that he thought I did a good job.
Up until that point, I’ve not really had direct, clear, unambiguous positive feedback on my writing. This isn’t a diss for my former mentors, since, like many academics, I’m extremely easy to discount any positive feedback. My papers have been called “promising”, which really isn’t a compliment by the way. I’ve gone through a series of revisions with someone to have them say it “looks good” at the end, which is nice but not quite the same. I’ve gotten into conferences which I attributed to luck and small submission pool (<- which I have no evidence of). People have told me that my talks were “interesting” but, c’mon, philosophers think everything is interesting.
What I’m trying to say is that it really isn’t about me having an exceptionally rational, objective, and level-headed relationship with compliments. It’s that when compliments are delivered in such a direct, thoughtful, unprompted way, it’s really hard to discount them. So I didn’t discount it. I took it to be genuine and told myself that I’d stop doubting my ability as a writer. I’ve by and large succeeded.
Sometimes I hear people say that compliments don’t work because we’d always find ways to explain them away. I doubt that most people have heard enough compliments to draw this conclusion, though. Compliments don’t work when they appear random, are not backed by evidence or argument, or when there are compelling alternative explanations (e.g., they have reasons to try to be polite). Negative feedback wouldn’t work under those conditions either.
Note that I’m not arguing for the idea of our self worth being defined by external validation being a great or healthy idea. This is what I’m saying: the problem we are trying to solve is that we think we are worthless and we shouldn’t think so. How this problem came to be is that we get too many negative feedback and not enough positive feedback. One way to solve it is to tell ourselves to not take feedback. That sounds like both a bad idea and wouldn’t work. What I suggest is an alternative way to solve it, which is to give more positive feedback to each other.
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