Don’t let things receive too much importance
If you are in academia, these questions might sound familiar: How many papers have I published? Are they in good journals or conferences? What's my citation count and h-index? Will I get into this program or secure that internship? Can I become a faculty member?
Zoom out.
Most people — probably more than you imagine — don’t even know what a PhD program exactly is or what a faculty member exactly does.
Being a Stanford professor is a big thing… in the academic world. The majority of people don’t even know where Stanford is or why it is such a good school. Hell, I don’t even know all the reasons why Stanford is such a good school. Most people just don’t care about that.
But even the people who do care about that cannot fully grasp the complexity of your situation. Are you a bad researcher because you have a low h-index? Is your paper of low quality because it was rejected in its first submission to a top venue? Nobel prize winners and papers cited thousands of times that never got published are here to disprove that. Peter Higgs and John Clauser have an h-index of ~30 and won the Nobel Prize. Both the RoBERTa and Longformer papers were never accepted for publication, but gained over 20,000 and 5,000 citations.
With the fast-growing face of research, many hiring and promotion decisions will probably rely on someone else’s judgment of your work. Achievements on paper are just a pre-filter for many things that follow. People who want to work with you want to see whether you are smart, can get stuff done, and, importantly, whether they feel like they want to work with you.
Your (work) life has much more nuance than can be quantified through numbers.
Don’t let your research profile gain too much importance. Don’t get me wrong, doing good research is important (if research is your goal). But having prestigious publications or highly cited papers is a byproduct of that.
If you do good work, you will eventually succeed.