“Believe it or not, you're ready to take a risk. Actually, it's not even a risk -- you know the price of staying exactly where you are is just too much. Move toward what genuinely moves you. Don't stop 'til you get there.”
I read my horoscope late in the day today. Maybe it is good. Because had I read this beforehand I might have freaked out wondering what I was supposed to do. Now that the day is mostly over I can step back and high five myself. (Because there is nobody else in my office…)
I got an e-mail this morning saying that my company has decided to move on my big proposal to an external funding agent. It is a high risk, high payoff venture. I was paid earlier in the year to write this proposal, then contracts backed out and said no. The person (wuss) who funded me to write the proposal stood aside and said, “oh well”. My team lead was irate and vowed to at least use this as lessons learned and “look here we have a bright young scientist with a great idea and we are just shoving it aside”.
The biggest problem is that it does not fit with the overall mission of my department. It is a super idea, if I worked at a weapons lab. But I don’t. I get it, I need to focus my energies elsewhere, on our tasks and problems at hand. Oh a whim last week I sent it to a sector manager who raised a holy living stink with contracts and single handedly forced them to define, in writing, how exactly contracts would deal with proposals of this type. (While I sat aside beaming that he liked my idea and it got his attention enough to investigate why it could not go out the door.) Once this was done this morning I was assigned a contracts specialist to work with me in getting it out the door.
It is proposal time. I just sent another concept paper off. It is likely to crash and burn, but I did get special permission from a sector manager to put it in. So while they may laugh and scoff at my proposal, the sector manager’s signature does grace it. And I know for a fact that it has caught the eye of two other managers since they have inquired personally about it with the caveat that “well you know this really isn’t the appropriate outlet for this, but it is an intriguing concept” and “have you thought about submitting this to XXX organization?”.
I was told when I started here that you don’t let a proposal call go by without responding to it with something. This is my something to this call. Also among that list of rules is to never recycle a proposal or concept with the same org or call two year in a row, quick way to annoy the hell out of the reviewers and make them think you think they are stupid and forgetful. Advice was to give each proposal a 3-4 year rest between calls… give the reviewers time to forget and come at it with a fresh face. Given this turn around I need to start digging back into my proposals archive folders and see what is worthy of bringing back to the top.
I spent the morning brainstorming with one of my teams after our teleconference. We have been given a minimum $50K seed money for this coming year. This kills me since the proposal deadline is next week. If you don’t think a funding agent knows ahead of time what they are funding, think again. I am up to lead this project (yay!), now we just need a project. What are we going to do? An hour of brainstorming and I think we are all just sick of hearing each other’s voices.
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