Love your messes

In my writing assistant class at Hiram, we had to read Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird.” It was one of many guides for writing, but some of the lessons were actually useful. My favorite was: “Love your messes,” which was a lesson that single-handedly changed my term paper writing style. The idea was that perfectionism makes us want to edit as we go, to create as little mess as possible to go back and clean up. And that results in DAMN SLOW PROGRESS. Her advice was to only edit in hindsight, if possible. Just dump everything that comes across your mind onto the paper, THEN go back and make it good. Love and expose your messes, and then use that perfectionism to polish them into gems. Thanks to this lesson, I once wrote an entire paper on the diversity of non-vascular plants while half asleep. Or maybe completely asleep. The fact is I didn’t remember what I wrote, but when I revisited it the next day it stood as a respectable rough draft.

I’ve been fighting the same perfectionism in my research. I want things to work perfectly, so much so that I’ll often put off new experiments for ridiculous amounts of time. I’ll rationalize that with one more day I could plan a much better experiment. Everything would be laid out so much more perfectly.

Of course, there is a saying in scientific research: “Data is a bonus the first time you do an experiment.” Experiments rarely go perfectly the first time around, and even if they did, you’d still need to go back and do them several more times to confirm anything. More than that, experiments are perfected by doing them, not by additional planning. By allowing yourself to do the experiment and mess up, you learn all sorts of things that can get edited out next time. Like, “I can’t pipet THAT fast” or “this tube needs to be on the left side of the bench, not the right.”

I just finished the first pass of a new protocol yesterday. It involved working with radiation, so it was exhausting. It’s a lot like working with bacteria—easier in some ways, because there’s no wand you can swipe over yourself to check for bacterial contamination. But then again, a bit of soap will kill most bacteria, while radioactive materials need to sit safely for weeks or decades to decay to safety. Anyway, I barely slept the night before the experiment, because I kept thinking of all sorts of reasons I couldn’t do the experiment. All the different ways it would go wrong and I’d contaminate the whole lab . . . I’d confessed it all to Andy and he’d laughed and told me how normal that feeling was (this is a huge bonus of dating another science nerd).

In the end, nothing exploded. I didn’t contaminate anything. But my results were inconclusive. My boss, after looking at the data, gave me several smarter controls that I should have thought of, and at first I just wanted to keel over with shame. All that work and one more condition would have made a huge difference. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. But in grad school you learn that if you knew all this stuff to begin with, then you’d already have a PhD and tenure. We’re all smart kids and we’re used to getting it right the first time. After 21 some years of that being the case, it can be hard to shake this perspective. I’m getting there, but I’m frustrated with my own slowness. Progress is progress though. . . .