One of the hardest things about being an academic is that we are constantly prostrating ourselves to our peers and asking for their approval. Not because we want a pat on the back or to feel good about ourselves but because our existence depends on it. Grants, papers, talks, they all are geared towards presenting our work so that others will give us the thumbs up and say that it is good. To be successful you have to get your colleagues to agree that your work is exciting and important.
To some extent this is no different than being in high school or college. You work on projects or write papers and submit them to the higher authority and hope they like your work. But, now instead of being given an assignment to work on for a week (or even 6 weeks), you come up with your own assignment. You develop an idea yourself (something you think is fascinating and important), you come up with the questions (and hope they are interesting to others), you design the research (and try to make it rigorous, powerful, and feasible), you analyze the data (and make every effort to use the right stats), you write the paper (and hope your ideas translate well). You spend months or sometimes years on one single paper, then you give it (your baby) to a journal editor and they send it out to some anonymous experts to review. And then you wait.
And you wait, and you wait to hear back. And then, finally, you get the verdict. More often than not, the answer is no. No, we don't think this is exciting enough, or novel enough or important enough. No, we don't think you did this, that and the other correctly. No, although you agonized over your word choice and whether to analyze the data this way or that way, the conclusion you came to is wrong. And there it is.
That baby, the one you labored on for so long, they don't like it and don't want it. It is not good enough for them. And for some people this easily translates into, you are not good enough. It can be challenging for the ego to say the least. And you do this over and over and over again. This is your entire career. Repeatedly handing an axe over to someone else, laying you head down on the chopping block and hoping you did enough hard work, and are lucky enough, that the axe won't fall.
