Meet the authors Alexander Clark and Bailey Sousa

What inspired you to write a book encouraging academics to focus on their happiness and success?

Academic work is too challenging and our lives and health too important not to think and act on being happy. During the early stages of our own work, all over the world, we heard clearly from students and academics of their struggles, their successes, and their fears. We saw so much talent, but also a great need for far more discussion about success and happiness in academic workplaces.

The health and well-being of students and academics continues to deteriorate yet academic support for doing and sustaining great work have never been more important but also scarce. We really wanted to make a difference by writing a book that brought together the best of research and theory from across disciplines to help all those who do academic work to do great academic work but also sustain deeper satisfaction and well-being.
 

Why is it so important to be a happy academic?

Being a happy academic is important because this work is so difficult, so demanding of ourselves, and also so competitive. But being happy helps us do better work. Expectations around academic work continue to rise and diversify across the world. Academic work is uniquely challenging and there are many, many choices about what to prioritize and how to spend our time. So many external factors influence our work success, yet all we can really influence is how we see things and what we choose to do. This provides a vital and sustaining impetus which allows the strongest bases for meeting the demonstrable challenges of doing academic work well.
 

What advice would you give to an early career academic taking their first steps in a long career?

We recommend building your career and actions on your values. To do this you must first be very clear about what those values are: your own ‘big why’ which underpins the reasons why you chose academic work in the first place, and what impact/influence you want to have from this work. Holding on and returning to this big why as you navigate your long career, it’s successes and it’s failures, provides the most enduring of foundations.

Secondly, prioritizing doing the right things is essential. Often early career academics can be sucked into thinking and believing that emails and meetings, as well as a plethora of other ‘busy-work’, are productive and/or necessary uses of time to further their work. But these detract from the work, stop us from fully realizing our potential, and can even blind us from seeing what the right things are to advance our work. For example: we hear a lot that many academic workplaces focus on working long hours and visibly doing so, but nothing could be less effective then prioritizing work inputs over outputs. We encourage early career academics to come out of the effectiveness closet and proclaim themselves as advocates for effectiveness – working better not working longer.
 

You hold workshops regularly helping academics be more effective - what are your key takeaways that most academics need to focus on?

Academic work involves so many complex trade-offs and choice: it’s usually demanding intellectually and often so nebulas. Yet, paradoxically, what makes good academic work happen is the anti-thesis of this. Effective academic work will NOT HAPPEN BY MAGIC. It requires specific approaches to handling daily mundane tasks, in this way, approaches to work are necessary that are highly disciplined and even formulaic.

Our workshops and book provide the process, tools, and resources to help make successful academic work possible. Most importantly, to:

• Acknowledge the importance of values in academic work
• Utilize our Success Pyramid to identify your personal Success Indicators and work towards them
• Focus on priority, not time management
• Develop The Core skills that will help across all academic work
   

Being an academic and being stressed often go hand in hand. What one piece of advice could you give to help academics thrive?

All too often a myriad of external factors make our work difficult while academics themselves are unaware of all of the resources that they can draw on to help them realize their visions for the work.

However, thriving in academic work, despite these external factors, only ever starts with you! Because in the midst of all of the factors that influence the success and failure of our work we control only two: how we see things and how we act. The complexities of work related to its extreme nature, other people, and other organizations will always be there. This is a given. Prioritizing our focus on what we truly can influence is tremendously empowering: it provides a lens to see obstacles as opportunities, failure as a helpful friend, and every experience as a chance to grow. Academic work will always be difficult, but by focusing on ourselves we provide the strongest foundation for ourselves and our work.