The Status Trap

Been busy lately...lot's to do at work, and I spend all my free time either reading stuff in my field or doing research. Submitted a paper to a pretty high-ranking journal in my field, with the help of someone with some math and programming skills. The paper has passed by 3 of 6 possible phases of rejection. Now its just hanging in limbo, past the date feedback from peer reviewers should have come back (though I hear slow replies are normal at a lot of places). The journal has a 95% rejection rate, so we'll see...it answers the questions it sets out to pretty thoroughly, so even if its turned down, I think it'll find a home somewhere eventually.

But anyway, took some time off to just surf the net again, and came across a really interesting article on the link between self-esteem and perceived social status, not just in terms of your income, but in terms of your standing with your friends and at your job.

It's an interesting theory. This paradigm actually accounts for a lot of common, everyday behaviors that I never thought had a satisfactory explanation. We see office politics over meaningless little things all the time. These behaviors get dismissed as "petty", even though all but the best of us tend to get caught up with them at some point. This actually offers a rational explanation as to why that would be, rather than just shrugging the phenomenon off, as it usually is. It's one of those elephants in the room of human behavior, all around us, but almost never acknowledged.

The article mentions competing with yourself, and comparing yourself to where you were a few years ago, as a way of staying out of status games with people around you. I have another strategy for staying out of the "status trap"- put your focus into being capable as someone in your field, not just as someone who's capable in his/her immediate surroundings. If you focus on your own workplace, it can lead to competing with people around you. But if you focus on developing your skills to be competitive anywhere, it can lead to partnering with the people around you to become better as a group, and better teamwork.