The Batteries European Partnership Association, BEPA, recently shared 9 Battery Stars awards. I was lucky to be one of the rewarded people, together with inspiring scientists from Europe. That was a huge surprise and I’m still amazed by this recognition. I never could have believed anything like this a few years ago, when I started to work with batteries. You can see the awarded and happy group in this image.

As we are now in the middle of year 2024 and my summer holidays are starting, I felt like summarizing my experiences from the first six months. I definitely have not felt like a star always. On the contrary, I often feel that I am not doing enough. We should find solutions to cut down greenhouse gas emissions quickly, but research progresses usually slowly.

I know I’m not the only person to feel that she or he is not doing enough. Thus, I wanted to share here some challenges I have faced and remind myself and others that it is not possible, needed, or even good to succeed in everything. Often, we see and read only about positive highlights, but there is always hard work and disappointments behind every achievement.

So, what is good enough?

Publications

One of my pain points is the low number of scientific publications I have been able to write or co-author aften jumping into battery research. First, it took time to build up the infra, acquire funding for the work, and build a team of researchers. And of course, do the actual research. Now, we would have results available to be published. But often something more urgent comes up and it is difficult to find time for writing a paper.

I also often think: What is good enough to be published? I do not want to write scientific publications just to have more papers on my publication list. We also often work with upscaling topics, which might not be considered scientifically interesting in academia and thus might not fit into the focus of academic journals. I’m thus sometimes struggling to decide if our work is worth of publishing in a scientific journal.

As a guideline, I try to use the following. If somebody else can learn from our work, it is worth of publishing. If there is scientific novelty, we can write a scientific publication. If the novelty is not super evident, I anyway try to share our learnings in some way. It can be in this blog, in media, a technical paper, or something else.

It is a duty of a researcher to share information.

Rejected proposals

It is also challenging to find funding. For example, the Horizon calls for batteries have become more competitive. I have received several rejections this spring, both from Horizon Europe and national calls. And zero positive decisions! This is of course very frustrating as we are investing a lot of time in the writing and the topics would have been really interesting. But this is how it sometimes goes. There are good periods and proposal are accepted, but often there are also periods when there are just rejections.

Even though every rejection is a disappointment, I have always learned a lot during proposal preparation and often also met new people working in the battery field. So, the time has not been wasted. And I think that if someone has prepared a better proposal than me, then they deserve to get the funding. Since this is not about me. It is about advancing the battery research in the best possible way.

Coping with stress

What also led to me to think about “good enough” was that my smart watch was telling me that my sleeping quality was poor for one week in a row! This usually does not happen to me. Maybe one poor night sometimes, but not this much. And yes, I know that I should not fully trust the smart watch, but it indicates something anyway.

I think the main reason for this was travelling, both for work and on my free time. There were several events this spring, and even though they were super interesting, and I was happy to participate, too much is too much. Especially for an introvert like me.

Once realizing this, I understood that I again need to slow down a bit. I cleaned up my calendar, prioritised, and asked for help for some of the tasks, which could not just be dropped or postponed. I felt at the same time awful and relieved when I said no to some tasks. I read from somewhere that saying no is your superpower. And I fully agree with it! Still learning this though.

Cleaning up the calendar helped, but I was still not fully recovered. The final touch was to do my favourite yoga, switch off my phone in the evening, and magically, my sleeping quality jumped directly from poor to excellent! And if you wonder which yoga works (at least for me), it is the 1-hour Forrest Yoga by Craig Norris, which is available in the Yogaia app 😊 This is not a paid advertisement. I just want to share this with you as it has helped me so much. It is somehow tough and relaxing at the same time.

What works for me

I also need to maintain good habits that make me feel better. I have tested many things, but some habits seem to work for me quite well. These include, in addition to yoga:

Journaling, which can be just adding in my paper calendar each day one thing that made me happy, or which went well. And then write down “The one thing”, which I will do the next day. If I have more time and energy, I can write for longer, but this simple habit is easier to maintain.

Quiet time, which can be arranged in a form of reading a book or in the best case by sitting by a river, rapids, sea, or a lake for some time. Being close to water makes me feel calm.

Running, which I enjoy doing preferably on trails. I need to thank my friend Heidi who persuaded me to participate in a half marathon trail run about two years ago. I first thought I could not make it, but it was great! I fell in love with trail running and this spring I even managed to finish a 34 km trail run (again, needed a gentle push from Heidi to have courage to register 😉):

Flamenco, which I do once a week in a class by the best teacher Milena Urmas who has the craziest ideas how to combine traditional flamenco with other styles, such as music by Queen or movements from yoga. It is never boring and requires so much concentration on the steps that I fully forget the rest of the world and possible problems in her classes.

Conclusions

Summing up, good enough is much better than too much. It is good to find our own way to feel good. Different methods work for different people, but I hope you found some inspiration from this blog to find what is suitable for you. But one thing is common for all. We all need people to engage with. Friends, family, and colleagues, who can for example encourage us to do things that feel scary, or who can help us when we face challenges.

And oh yes, the name of this blog reminds me about John B. Goodenough, one of the winners for the Nobel prize in Chemistry regarding Li-ion battery development. If you have not yet done so, I recommend watching his interview, where he speaks about the importance of dialog and highlights that “We compete against problems, not against people”. This is good to remember especially when coping with research proposal rejections.