Hubris
In order to succeed in life, you don't have to be any good, you just have to be the best. But being the best does not entitle you to believe you are any good. - Sadly, Porn.
Just because you think your ideas are good, does not mean anyone else will. Two months ago I was proud of my accomplishment, high on the effort that it took to achieve it. As a researcher or creator broadly, one imagines that the more work they put into something the higher the quality, but reality is not so kind. Effort can be spent poorly, and quality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
This is a long way of saying that we resubmitted to CoLM after ICML reviews came out. At first I was despondent, but I had been working on improvements in the intervening two months and I do believe the CoLM submission is much stronger than what we submitted to ICML, and the paper is a better fit for CoLM than ICML. I'm still proud of what I accomplished. I'm progressively becoming a better researcher. But I'm not in the mental state I was in when I wrote that last piece, high on victory. I'm back to slow boring,
I've been writing a lot since last time, working on ideas, polishing. What my relationship to research should be, what my relationships to media should be, and more. These are evolving. Some lessons on research I've been thinking about are below.
The best way for me to plan a project is to break down the process into many small pieces and set aggressive deadlines for each. There is a tradeoff between how much one anticipates problems (and thus solves them before tackling the main problem) and how much one gathers evidence to actually determine what problems to solve. Anticipate too many problems and you may waste time on irrelevant ones; anticipate too few and and you get waste effort to rediscover your intuitions. Like many problems, this boils down to improving/understanding/trusting/acting on your intuitions.
Uninterrupted work time is so important, and will either happen in the morning or at night. The afternoon is always in theory a great time to get work done, but reality conspires against it: it is when everyone is available and when things happen.
Do not be afraid to ask for help. Although you have improved upon this throughout the years, your instincts are still to ask for help too little. Be humble.
You have a one track mind, and it is your greatest strength and weakness. Some weaknesses are important to work on, and some strengths should not be trusted to bear weight. Your one track mind instead needs to be embraced for your highest productivity, for good or ill.
There is one exception to the above. Your one track mind always views the grass greener elsewhere, and has a longing for novelty beyond what you need. When you do something, do it right and do it well.
My thoughts on media are forthcoming. I have written thousands of words on the subject over the past two months, most of it not quite right. I've tried various digital fasts and broken them, seen how I feel in a variety of conditions. Replaced the internet with books, or people, or travel, or staring at the wall, and seen effect each had on me. In the modern age, the question of what to replace our media with is largely a question of how we should live our life, given that we currently mostly live it staring at a screen.
It would be hubris to think I have a solution to that eternal question. But I think I grow closer to my the day, at least for myself