Reflections on My PhD Years

Working note — Part of my personal research notebook. Entries may be incomplete and are revised over time.

Reflections on My PhD Years:

• the essential conditions for doing deep research
  • alternating between intense deep work and mental cooldown (resting/vacation) phases.
• the importance of stupidity in research (see the original article)
• the ability to generate a hundred hypotheses in a single session and eliminate all but the most probable one
  • the iterative nature of thinking.
  • the iterative nature of editing.
• the importance of having a metric to know you’re heading in the right direction
  • look for a simpler case, or a similar problem, to reduce it to a known problem.
• debugging is detective work
• researching the unknown teaches us values that are hard to learn in school:
  • persistence, even when results seem unviable, until something proves you wrong.
  • the ability to take failure not personally but as a step forward toward the goal.
  • the art of productive failure.
  • the courage to explore uncharted territory.