Just start building things. Every once in a while you will build something no one else can. It’s not that you are the most brilliant person ever but that you have found a niche that isn’t trendy. When that niche also solves real problems my interest grows really high.
Finding a story helped. I found a story in the DNS, and it led to a sense there were stories to find, and I enjoyed finding them.
Having people come back with good questions helped. It means they are interested in the stories you are telling. Even being told they found weaknesses in your story helps, because it suggests there is more work to do.
Finding peers helps. Ruben Hirsch has talked about how in mathematics your field can be so narrow there are only 4 people you can talk to and 2 of them are doing your peer review so when things are rejected, you know who rejected it. He talks about this as a problem, but it's in the context of a branching tree of fields and of course there are parent branches with more people and side branches with more people. The point is not to have no speciality (being a generalist is a choice too) but the point is to understand who else is in your field and how you relate to them and talk to them.
Many biologists simply love the animal they study. to you or me it's just a ladybird. To them, it is embued with all the ideals of what being a ladybird IS, and that begs questions: why that number of dots? Is more dots more fertile? Is less dots more visible to a predator? Do more dots weigh more? do they cost more energy to paint? Where do ladybirds buy dot paint from? At this point, you are the ladybird. you are consumed by dots. Your life as you knew it, is defined by ladybirds. It helps that a famous movie actor is now enacting ladybird sex movies for kicks, making your fascination with ladybirds both topical, and interesting. You used to wear a small ladybird badge to parties. You are now at the igNobels, dressed as a ladybird, accepting a prize.
4 decades ago I was a bottle washer and water collector on slave wages for a long term marine ecology measurement of water quality and flows around an estuary. I visited the beach 60 times in a year. I could imagine myself being consumed by fascination with tides, and becoming a tides person, or with seaweed/laminaria and becoming a kelp farmer, or with nudibranches and somehow now measuring sewage levels indirectly by nudibranch population statistics, or designing better sewage outlets after learning how this influences water quality. Meh. I gave up marine biology bottle washing and took up computing. But the choice was there.
My point is that sure, you need to pay the bills, but also pay some respect to a drive in yourself to want to find out things. Thats key.
Just start building things. Every once in a while you will build something no one else can. It’s not that you are the most brilliant person ever but that you have found a niche that isn’t trendy. When that niche also solves real problems my interest grows really high.
yeah working in "random" (in a domain that sounds interesting and hiring undergrads) labs is a great tactic. do that asap, it helped me
Finding a story helped. I found a story in the DNS, and it led to a sense there were stories to find, and I enjoyed finding them.
Having people come back with good questions helped. It means they are interested in the stories you are telling. Even being told they found weaknesses in your story helps, because it suggests there is more work to do.
Finding peers helps. Ruben Hirsch has talked about how in mathematics your field can be so narrow there are only 4 people you can talk to and 2 of them are doing your peer review so when things are rejected, you know who rejected it. He talks about this as a problem, but it's in the context of a branching tree of fields and of course there are parent branches with more people and side branches with more people. The point is not to have no speciality (being a generalist is a choice too) but the point is to understand who else is in your field and how you relate to them and talk to them.
Many biologists simply love the animal they study. to you or me it's just a ladybird. To them, it is embued with all the ideals of what being a ladybird IS, and that begs questions: why that number of dots? Is more dots more fertile? Is less dots more visible to a predator? Do more dots weigh more? do they cost more energy to paint? Where do ladybirds buy dot paint from? At this point, you are the ladybird. you are consumed by dots. Your life as you knew it, is defined by ladybirds. It helps that a famous movie actor is now enacting ladybird sex movies for kicks, making your fascination with ladybirds both topical, and interesting. You used to wear a small ladybird badge to parties. You are now at the igNobels, dressed as a ladybird, accepting a prize.
4 decades ago I was a bottle washer and water collector on slave wages for a long term marine ecology measurement of water quality and flows around an estuary. I visited the beach 60 times in a year. I could imagine myself being consumed by fascination with tides, and becoming a tides person, or with seaweed/laminaria and becoming a kelp farmer, or with nudibranches and somehow now measuring sewage levels indirectly by nudibranch population statistics, or designing better sewage outlets after learning how this influences water quality. Meh. I gave up marine biology bottle washing and took up computing. But the choice was there.
My point is that sure, you need to pay the bills, but also pay some respect to a drive in yourself to want to find out things. Thats key.
That is such a good way to frame things, never thought about it that way. Thanks!
Asked god for a sign and found out about braiding in math