Beautiful book on research. The allure of doing it, what it takes to do it, and how to become better at it. The theme of chance runs throughout the book — once you have the basics down, a large part of your progress comes down to chance (in the way the book defines it).
Highly recommend the first 2 sections of the book for a great personal account into how someone did research throughout their career. Would love more reads like this — please send them my way. It’s rare to get such a deep inside view into people doing their work — there were parts where I could relate super heavy, and parts which made me rethink the way I do things — especially the strong idea of movement, and serendipity.
Good things come when you’re moving — things come when you’re moving in general. You must seek out novel stimuli, and do things for ideas to appear. Ideas often do come when you take a break from things, but you must have something you’re taking a break from in the first place. Being passive for too long kills motivation and progress.
The word meandering was used a lot, to describe moving in a somewhat interesting direction of research playfully. I’ve been thinking about this a bit: I think I really enjoy meandering, but at some point, also love exploiting. Like enough exploration, time to get this to the real world — and these two things often conflict a lot, and build up to a bunch of tension. Not sure how to balance the both of these things.
And when serendipity does bring something good to you — you must be able to recognise it. The way this book has taught me to look at chance is essentially as a trigger for ideas: to recognise this trigger, it helps to broaden the kinds of things you can think about, and the experiences you have. Basically: doing different things helps.
The third section wasn’t as illuminating — even though the overlap isn’t exact, I think Paul Graham’s How to do great work essay is a better next step after the first 2 sections.