Table 1 Ten Tips For Academic Success

• Keep an eye out for something new, exciting, and important to study.

• Interact and collaborate with colleagues and trainees who have skills you do not or see or do things differently than you. Look for analogies to see how problems have been solved in other fields.

• Listen, more than talk.

• Pick a mentor who, at any level of career, is looking to the future and striving to be at the forefront of the field. Joining a new enterprise at its inception under a young, inspiring leader, is often as good or even better option than joining a large, established enterprise under an older but busy entrenched leader.

• Know, but not necessarily accept, what has been said, written and accomplished in the past.

• Persevere but be willing to change course when you should change course; be focused but flexible.

• Make your research quantitative and hypothesis driven, and when things look like they fit, try to prove your hypotheses wrong!

• Learn how to teach effectively and how to write concisely. Get feedback from mentors and students.

• Broaden your horizons. Meet colleagues and students from other countries and cultures. You gain much from collaborating, teaching and learning with them, and establishing enduring friendships. Take sabbaticals.

• If you are a clinician, learn from your patients, take physiology and anatomy to the bedside, figure out how the brain works and write papers, or even a book to educate your colleagues.