Why smart scientists waste a lot of time
Blogger, programmer, and entrepreneur Paul Graham has an interesting essay called "Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas." While he is talking about tech startups, some of the ideas are applicable to PhD research, too. In particular, if you are going to spend a lot of time on something (like 5-8 years) it makes sense not to go with the very first idea you have– toss around lots of ideas to see which ones are worth pursuing. Lots of grad students get stuck in the middle of a project, and become more and more afraid to ditch the idea because of all the time they have already spent– even when the project clearly isn’t working.
Another piece of advice he gives is that if you are going to do business, you need to single-mindedly pursue ideas that make money. For scientists the goal is less clear. Of course, we all want to publish papers and get research money. But some people like to work on applications, others on fundamentals. Some like to do very carefully-planned, long-term projects, and others like to work on shorter ones. Some people like method development, and others would rather use existing methods to go after particular scientific problems. What to choose?
