Your success at work will never be perfect. Here’s a way to come to grips with that

If you were in a field where the absolute top of that field, the experts, the gurus, succeeded only 55% of the time, what would you think?

I learned recently that the top tennis players in the world make only 55% of their points. Astounding. Maybe we should rethink what “high performance” means.

But then in baseball, really successful players have batting averages of, what, 30+%? Ty Cobb was 36%, and very few since have come anywhere close.

That also reminded me of when I was a very young professor trying to learn about the world of journal articles and getting them published. I got some advice from a mentor who said, “Send something out every month, either a conference paper or a journal manuscript, every month.” I tracked it – wrote down what I’d sent out, to which journal, and whether they responded with a “no” or a “please revise and resubmit.”

(Only once in my career did I submit a manuscript, with an English professor whom I’d taught with, and the response was “Accepted as it is. Must be the English professor’s influence.”).

Over the years, I’ve reviewed my “hit rate”, meaning how often the papers were eventually accepted to be presented at a conference or published in a journal. For the first many years, my hit rate was about 30%. Now, I’ll admit, over the years, I got better at writing and better at understanding which journals to send to (that might be more open to my papers). I learned how to do quick and smoother revisions, so the hit rate did improve. But it never got anywhere close to 100%.

My point is that when we start something and even when we work at it for years, our “success,” our “hit rates,” will never be perfect and probably nowhere near. That gives me comfort. It just means I have more chances to improve if I work at it.

So when you have a minute in the car or the shower, think about your hit rate in your profession. What’s a good success measured by? And how do you get closer to 55% or 36% or whatever makes sense in your world?

Nancy Napier is a distinguished professor at Boise State University in Idaho. nnapier@boisestate.edu. She is co-author of “The Bridge Generation of Vietnam: Spanning Wartime to Boomtime.”

This story was originally published January 20, 2022 at 4:00 AM.