The golden rule: Don’t do research
Newcomers to the academy typically think that the recipe for success is to ‘do high-quality research’. Nothing could be more false. ‘Doing research’ (and writing papers about your ‘results’) is a tedious waste of time. It is no way to be hyper-productive. Savvy academics know that their true goal is to have their name stamped (as author) on stacks of published papers.
Here is a jingle to help you remember the golden rule:
Productive academics neither research nor write,
That is their subordinates’ plight.
To inflate their way up the productivity ramp,
academic hyper-producers perfect their namestamp.
The billboard
When you begin your scholarly enterprise, the first step is to frame academic papers in the correct light. Their purpose is not to ‘convey knowledge’. Scholarly papers are devices for delivering authorship. They are billboards for your name.
Like an eye-catching advertisement, a good scholarly paper is soundly constructed yet easy to mass produce. To achieve the requisite economics of scale, the successful hyper-producer must subcontract the job of billboard construction.
If you’ve entered academia because you ‘enjoy’ doing your own research, now is the time to change your attitude (or exit the field). To become an academic hyper-producer, your goal is to secure billboards on which to stamp your name.
In what follows, I will detail the two most popular strategies for billboard acquisition.
Strategy 1: Graffiti tagging
For the cunning entrepreneur, learning the art of graffiti tagging is a good way to become an academic hyper-producer. The goal is to surreptitiously add your namestamp to material published by someone else.
Graffiti tagging can be done either in wholesale or in piecemeal.
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