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Research and Rocky 1
“Be Like a Duck. Remain Calm on the Surface and Paddle Like Hell Underneath.”
Research is a grueling field punctuated with moments of luminosity. You draft your CV like you always knew in which direction you were headed, but chances are, you felt (you feel) like you were (like you are) expending an awful lot of energy treading water most of the time.
Breakthroughs make great stories, but they don’t really exist. More often, moments of clarity add up over time to expose something worth investigating further.
You don’t so much experience a lightbulb moment as progressively explore and build some shaky source of a little light (and pray hard you aren’t just unknowingly reflecting someone else’s ostensible genius.)
You’re not so much Rocky II as a perpetual Rocky I.
This may sound unexciting, but for the researchers that I know and love, it’s the only way to live: constantly trying to figure out what they are missing — vibrating between a solitary sense of ‘Eureka!’ and a public shoulder shrug of ‘well, damn.’
Because, as we all know, Rocky 1 is an objectively better film — Rocky II is cash-grab crappy fan service.
A good grant is Rocky 1. A good grant will reflect the duality behind the purported progress, both the grind and the quiet glory. How?
