Your Work Doesn’t Have to Stand the Test of Time
Why your published work is a snapshot, not a monument
Sarah (not her real name and shared with permission) had finished her book manuscript. Well, mostly finished. She’d received an encouraging revise and resubmit from a university press, completed most of the requested revisions, and had only a few sections left to polish before resubmission.
That was almost 12 months ago.
When I asked her what was holding her back, she described an image that had taken up residence in her mind: her book sitting on library shelves, spine out, with her name printed on it. Permanent. Available for anyone to read for decades to come. Maybe longer. “What if I got something wrong?” she said. “What if my thinking evolves and I no longer agree with arguments I made? What if it becomes a permanent record of ideas I’ll eventually outgrow?”
The image of her work as a fixed, unchangeable monument to her thinking had paralyzed her completely. She couldn’t bring herself to finish those final revisions and hit send.
If you’ve ever felt like Sarah—paralyzed by the perceived permanence of publication—you’re not alone. Many of us carry this same fear: that once our words are printed (or published online, archived in databases, or cited by others), they become eternal statements we’ll be bound to forever. But here’s what I’ve come to understand, and what I wish I could have told Sarah earlier: that image of permanence doesn’t actually depict the realities of academic knowledge production.
The Problem: How permanence thinking creates publication anxiety
The fear of permanence manifests in countless ways in our writing lives. We revise endlessly because “it has to be perfect—it’s going to be out there forever.” We hesitate to make strong arguments because “what if I change my mind later?” We delay submission because “I’m not ready to commit to these ideas permanently.” We imagine future versions of ourselves cringing at what we wrote today.
This anxiety is particularly acute in academia, where publications become part of our permanent record. They’re listed on our CVs. They’re searchable in databases. They’re cited (we hope) by other scholars. They feel like they’re carved in stone. The weight of world events can make this worse—when everything feels overwhelming, the words we’re trying to put on the page can feel even more trivial or inadequate. We worry: “What if this doesn’t matter? What if I publish this and it turns out to be irrelevant or wrong?”
So we keep polishing. Keep revising. Keep waiting for the moment when our work will be good enough to stand the test of time. But what if that’s not the right goal at all?
The Reframe: Publications as temporal snapshots, not eternal monuments
Here’s the liberating truth I wish someone had told Sarah (and maybe you need to hear it too): Your published work is not meant to represent your thinking forever. It’s a snapshot of where you are right now.
Think about it this way: One of the reasons I love training Brazilian jiu-jitsu is that there’s always something new to learn. I’ll never know everything about the art; instead, I’m always growing. If I had learned everything by the time I became a black belt, I probably would have stopped training. The lack of stimulation would have bored me. The same is true for scholarship and writing. We never arrive at knowing everything there is to know about our disciplines, and there are always ways to improve our thinking. That’s what drew most of us to this work in the first place—the quest to keep learning.
So why do we expect our publications to be complete, final, perfect statements? The reality is that our published research is part of an ongoing dialogue with other scholars. As Booth et al. explain in The Craft of Research, research exists within conversations—it responds to what came before and invites responses from what comes next. Your work contributes to a moment in that conversation. It doesn’t have to answer every question or anticipate every future development. Your article or book is a point in time in your intellectual journey, not something that must represent you in perpetuity.
And here’s the really freeing part: You’re allowed to change your mind.
The Reality: Scholars Revise and Evolve
Nearly every accomplished scholar I admire has revised their thinking over the course of their career. How many acclaimed academics do you know who have completely changed their theoretical frameworks? Who have written new introductions to second or third editions because they have new ideas about the concepts that made them famous? Who have published articles that begin with “I’ve reconsidered my earlier position on...”?
This isn’t a sign of weakness or flawed scholarship. It’s a sign of intellectual vitality. It means they kept learning, kept engaging with new ideas, kept growing.
If I were tasked with writing my book now, it would look quite different than what’s printed on those pages. This is because I’ve continued to read, think about, and discuss the work since submitting the final draft, which has altered my perspective on the research. Additionally, I wrote about a culturally specific moment that has shifted in significant ways since then. And you know what? I could not have predicted those changes, and my book was not intended to be a crystal ball.
Fields evolve. Methodologies advance. New evidence emerges. Cultural contexts shift. Of course our thinking changes. Scholars constantly revise themselves because knowledge production is an active, never static, process. The scholars we consider “classics” in our fields? Their work is constantly being reinterpreted, recontextualized, and sometimes challenged or revised by new generations. Even the most influential publications don’t stand unchanged through time—they’re read differently by different audiences in different moments.
The Liberation: How this mindset enables finishing and publishing
When I shared this perspective with Sarah, I could see a huge weight lift from her. She stopped expecting her book to be a timeless monument and started seeing it as a contribution to a current conversation. Within two months, she’d resubmitted her manuscript to the press.
She stopped asking herslef, “Is this perfect? Will this hold up forever?” and asked instead, “Does this contribute something valuable to the conversation happening right now?” The answer to that second question was yes. And that was enough. Viewing our published work as incomplete—as having room for growth—can actually help us let go of perfectionism and release that manuscript into the wild.
Here’s how this reframe might change your writing process.
Instead of “This has to be my definitive statement on this topic,” try “This is what I understand right now, based on the evidence I have.”
Instead of “I can’t publish until this is perfect,” try “I can publish when this makes a solid contribution to the current conversation.”
Instead of “What if I’m wrong?” Try “What if this sparks interesting responses and pushes my thinking forward?”
Instead “This will represent me forever,” try “This represents where my thinking is today—and that’s valuable.”
This doesn’t mean publishing sloppy work or skipping rigorous revision. It means recognizing that your job is to make a well-supported argument that matters to your field right now, not to produce the final word on a topic.
The Invitation: Permission to publish your incomplete, evolving thinking
So here’s what I want to tell you, especially if you’re feeling like Sarah—sitting on a manuscript right now, afraid to send it out into the world: Your work doesn’t have to stand the test of time.
It must contribute to the ongoing conversation in your field or respond to a current cultural moment or condition in the world around us. It has to be well-researched and well-argued. It has to matter to someone beyond yourself or even your field. But it doesn’t have to be your final word on the matter. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to anticipate every possible critique or evolution in your thinking.
You will keep learning after you publish this. You will keep growing. You might even change your mind about parts of it. And all of that is not only okay—it’s the whole point of being a scholar.
Consider this your permission to write imperfectly, to publish work that represents your current thinking rather than your eternal position, and to contribute to the ongoing conversation even when you know your ideas will continue to evolve.
The manuscript you’re working on right now? It’s not a monument. It’s a snapshot. It’s a contribution. It’s a moment in your intellectual journey. And that’s exactly what it should be.
So finish it. Revise it thoughtfully. And then release it into the world, knowing that your thinking will continue long after you hit “submit.” That’s not a weakness of your work. That’s the beauty of being a scholar who never stops learning.
Excellent advice.