Resilience Pays Posted on February 28, 2008 Determination is vital for academic success, says Peter Salovey (bio).

Being resilient, it turns out to be important. Being able to read that letter from the editor of a journal telling you that your article is not going to be accepted and being able to get back to work the next day. You can wallow in it for an hour or two, but that's it. Then you’ve got to be resilient and get back to it.

Our first article called “Emotional Intelligence,” which was published in a very small journal in 1990: One of the reasons that article was published in a small journal is because it was rejected from three major APA journals, and it was thought to be too controversial. The idea was new, and it got whacked around pretty good by traditional intelligence researchers who didn't believe this could be thought of using the metaphor of intelligence. It got whacked around by people in the traditional areas of emotion, who at the time were not very interested in individual differences. And we tried to take the criticisms in stride, that is, to modify our arguments based on what we thought were legitimate, and many of the criticisms were legitimate, but then to keep at it.

And if we hadn't published that article, Dan Goleman's best selling book would not have been called Emotional Intelligence, because he asked us about the phrase and told us he was going call the book something else until he heard our phrase and said he liked it and wanted to call his book that. And it wouldn't be, for better or for worse, for strong research programs and everything else that has happened since, it wouldn't have existed if we hadn't persisted.

And so I think the point is, I think smarts are very important. I think you have to be intelligent to, I think, have a successful career in psychology, but it's not enough -- there are many, many smart people who don't make it. And I think that's unfortunate, but it's a reality. And those other skills have to with other domains of competence.

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