Simo Hosio

Pessimistic about your next paper, fellow academic? Check what you were about to do next. If you were going to double down and make the paper better, good. Celebrate. Give yourself a real high five inside your head. If you were heading for a coffee, the dishes, or cleaning your room for the 10th time, stop it. Your brain is playing tricks on you. We all do this in academia, and we can unlearn it. More of this at simohosio.com

crazy week. crazy week also last week. the birth of a new funding proposal is pain. the good pain. the last drops of sanity, gone. but plenty of good ideas (??) were birthed on the paper. manifesting. that's the only thing that i can do more for this one.

Gemini's top 2 daily tiny things most can do with the most impact if done consistently. Two words: morning walk. simohosio.com/qs/

Academics, that afternoon break might be making your focus worse. For most of us it's the phone. Ten minutes of doom scrolling because you're tired and it kind of feels like rest. Your brain comes back more tired and confused than before. Next time try ten minutes of doing nothing at all. Look out the window, drink that coffee, leave the phone on the desk, and pay attention to how the next hour goes. More of this at simohosio.com

Did da Vinci stay in his lane? Marie Curie? Benjamin Franklin? Your research career doesn't have to either. Art, science, engineering, anatomy. Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. Writer, inventor, diplomat. I know these are geniuses, and you and I may not have their faculties. The principle is the same. One lane might make your academic life easier. Will it make it happier? If exploring different fields is what you enjoy, do that. Otherwise you'll end up miserable and quit. More of this at simohosio.com

Academics, when the afternoon is just gone, here's what I do. I set an alarm for twenty minutes, lie down, and put on a fifteen-minute NSDR video from YouTube. They're free, and there are loads of them. Somebody talks you through relaxing your body and releasing stress and tension. After that I feel amazing again, like I got the morning hours back. A bit of a strange habit, I know. Try it once on a bad afternoon and see what happens. More of this at simohosio.com

Ever sent a paper or a grant somewhere you thought you had no chance? Every academic has. And while you worked on it, the same thought ran over and over. It's not gonna get accepted, I'll just throw it in there as a test. I do that quite often. A couple of weeks ago I caught myself at it again, and I realised I didn't do my best job, because I'd given myself an excuse. More of this at simohosio.com

Even good AI-written (finalised, finished, whatever you want to call it) text seems to be hard to read. I think we could incorporate something like "reading experience" to things ment to be read by humans. It's an entirely fair argument to make that e.g. all papers are no longer meant for humans. But the ones that are... What about the radical idea that you write them like as if you're explaining the substance to another human. There is no sane way at this point to prompt LLMs to write well. It just doesn't exist. Prove me wrong. And I'm not even mad. Just saying. A bit like the world of everyday objects now is largely cheap plastic, and a generation ago that could've been seen as shocking. Maybe the future is agents creating and writing to each other, and then we have the hand-written pieces that are meant for humans. If you want a good hobby, write something. I write a newsletter and blog posts. And funding proposals. All of these are heavily AI-assisted at this point. But every sentence is (re)written by my hands and goes through my brain. Anyway. Have a great Sunday! Next week, new chance to shine again! --- And remember to plan the week so you actually get some good stuff (tm) done: simohosio.com/planners !

Human win. Loving this. AI wins in SO many things, but manual / crowdsourced curation for some things... still has its place in the world.

Walk: simohosio.com/qs

Retreated to a writing cave. Can't escape the feeling. :D

Why are some Americans so angry? 😀 A little context. I buy ads these days to my course "The Focus Reset" (pic 100% related). First I thought this is a one-off thing, but the pattern is clear by now. Practically all of the hate-comments I get are from Americans screeching that "YEAH I BET THIS DUDE HAS NO KIDS" and other condescending remarks about... not even the content, but about me. ~~ roughly talking about that whatever I say in the ad is not doable because they have kids and I'm a "bro with no idea what I'm talking about." I have three kids by the way. And yes I advertise outside the US too. And the commenters are always American. Not sample bias. And I can't do half the things I teach. That's the point. You take what you can, and factor that to your life. I teach a buffet methodology. Figure out what works, then narrow it down to what you can try, then try it out and keep what you can. Scoring the wins you can and ignoring what you can't is such a life hack. Also not being all the time so angry is something worth considering.

Researchers, feel the pessimism rising about your paper? Stop, and go back to it. And celebrate, because you caught yourself. You caught your own bullshit, so to say, and you didn't fall into self-handicapping. Think about the word itself. Do you want to be handicapping yourself? No. More of this at simohosio.com

Sending a paper somewhere? Your brain may be quietly sabotaging it to protect your ego. One way it protects you is to hand you excuses, so when the rejection comes, and in academia we all get rejections all the time, your ego doesn't take a hit. I didn't even try that hard. If I only had one more week to polish this thing, it would have been accepted. So your brain gets you to not do your best, all to spare your ego. More of this at simohosio.com

Scared your paper won't get accepted? For academics, that anxiety can be rocket fuel. Oh my God, this is difficult. It's highly unlikely I'll get accepted. But I'm gonna shoot my shot anyway. That thought can push you to go harder into your work. Polish the paper one more time, double check your statistics, ask for feedback before sending it. It's called defensive pessimism, the good kind of pessimism. More of this at simohosio.com

One of the things that we get so wrong is waiting for others to give us gifts Give give give, me me me me me Giving yourself those gifts that matter most every single day is a skill you can learn simohosio.com/more-work-will…

Morning walk (iykyk) Morning coffee (not iced, boo) Met a pig (old friend at Kiikeli) A bit of writing. Planning. Radiating good vibes to yourself. Is all it takes to not be miserable. ( And yes after all this good vibing and doing all the good stuff for yourself, avoiding doing the work, next up is simply sitting down with the laptop, closing everything else, and putting words on the document. Manifesting a million-dollar grant. That's what's really up. )

Greetings from a very very early morning walk from a and empty, pretty dark, but absolutely awesome downtown Oulu You don't have the time to not give yourself the gift of a good walk every day And you don't have to do a lot. Just work a bit on day 1, a bit more on day 2, and on day 3 try to extend it just a couple of steps more simohosio.com/qs/

Academics are insecure about their imperfections just like anyone else. Yet, that's what folks miss. Don't slopify everything. Just be yourself. Cliche but so true.