Motivation to keep going

[kirk21]

How do you motivate yourself after getting negative feedback? Received quite some remarks on my paper and I wonder how you cope with this.
(Made a small tool  this weekend to challenge myself  ; hope it can help you as well)

[yhakak]

well, it really depends. Do you respect the people who gave you these comments?

[Lisa44201]

Heh, you get used to it. Some folks are more constructive than others. I've come to see commentary on my papers as a checklist of things to fix for the next draft.

[booksnlooks]

I agree with Lisa44201 in terms of looking at it as a checklist of ways to improve. It also helps to separate yourself from your work and not take it too personally. Hard to do, I know, but looking at it as an opportunity to improve rather than a critique of you personally is way more motivating.

[Guest |||]

If you could produce work that doesn't require revision and edits, than maybe you should petition not having to complete grad school.

[TakeruK]

Getting a ton of commentary/revisions is a normal part of graduate school, I think. In addition to seeing it as a list of ways to make your next draft better, I also find that it helps to know that if someone did not care about your work at all, they would not have spent the time reading carefully and pointing out all the issues. Because I know that when I get comments it means that someone has taken the time to think about what I wrote, I always make sure to consider everything they said and address it in some way (i.e. implement the change or make a note of why I did something else instead etc.)

[pears]

It's important to remember that most people give critiques with an overall good intention, i.e., they want to help you improve your research & writing skills. However, even the most accomplished professors are still humans (although I can think of a few of my nerd idols who may be brilliant, hyper-efficient kindly cyborgs…); we all communicate in different ways. Sometimes the professor who writes the most blunt or harsh comments is the one who wants you to succeed the most, and sometimes the reviewer who writes the least in the comments will have the most to say face to face.

 

If you can, make some face time. If a reviewer is one of the rare few who decides bullying is more important that constructive criticism, it's really hard for most people to continue being a mega-jerk for laughs in person (read: academic bullies can be very cowardly). However, it's far more likely that you may have misread their intentions, and you'll probably leave feeling better after knowing that they want you to improve & succeed.

[juilletmercredi]

I just remember that I am awesome.

LOL, seriously, I remember that I wouldn't be getting any feedback at all if the people in my professional life thought I was not worth it.  My adviser would just be like "Redo this," and any journal reviewers would simply reject my papers.  The fact that you get a revise/resubmit is evidence that you've done something worth reviewing.

[mandarin.orange]

I just remember that I am awesome.

 

I like juilletmercredi's advice a lot. In fact, you could get yourself this t-shirt as a constant reminder of that fact: