If everyone likes your work, you can be certain that you haven’t done anything important. Conflict and pain go with the territory — that of changing how a profession thinks and furthering what we know about our world. The pressures on young researchers are to conform, to accept fashionable ways of analyzing problems, and above all to please senior professors and their own peers. Unfortunately this is bad for scientific progress. [This fact is perhaps the single most helpful thing I have learned, and would pass on to any young researcher who wishes to listen to advice, which I confess is very probably what I would not have done when I happened to be in my late twenties.]
The main difference between world-class researchers and sound researchers is not intellect; it is energy, single-mindedness, more energy, and the ability to withstand what will sometimes feel like never-ending disappointment, tiredness and psychological pain. Tenacity is almost everything. [This is the second key thing I have learned.]
—excerpted from a talk called Things I would have found useful to have been told when I was a young researcher–at the terrific site of Andrew Oswald, Professor of Economics and Expert in Happiness
