Author: Michael Nielsen

>From the comments and Daniel Lemire’s blog:

When I started out doing research, I thought that research was about sitting in your office thinking up new ideas. God! Was I wrong!

Now, don’t get me wrong, research is not about having meetings with other researchers or spending time chatting, or drawing UML diagrams of what is to be done, or spending weeks on funding proposals. We might do these things, but they don’t make us good researchers. But neither will sitting in your office thinking new ideas. That’s not effective research.

On quasi-desert islands with no telecommunications, you’ll find very few great researchers. The social network doesn’t need to be immediate: I think you can be a great researcher even in a tiny school. And I don’t think your network should be made of students mostly, especially not your own students.

I believe the secret to being a good researcher is to belong to a tightly knitted group of solid researchers. Research is about networking. By tightly knitted, I don’t necessarily mean “military-like”: I mean that you feel peer pressure all the time to do good research. This can be achieved through emails, blogging, phone… whatever the mean…

Social forces are incredible things. As a researcher, being in a good social environment (which may need to be created from scratch) is like being a runner with a 50 kph tail wind. A turning point in the early days of my research group was the installation of a couple of sofas in front of a whiteboard in the room next to my office. It wasn’t my idea, but boy, was it about the best $30 we ever spent…

Self-development

Principles of personal change

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get
what you always got. – Australian netballer Vicki Wilson

How can we build personal habits that encourage research excellence? My belief is that the key is to examine in explicit detail our actualSet behavioural goals: To achieve meaningful personal change you need to know how you want to behave, what habits you want to have. Set goals for yourself. Write them down. Be precise. Some of the goals should be short-term; in fact, it’s best to start that way, since you can then get into the habit of improvement. Start small – there’s no need, initially, for a comprehensive program.

Set simple goals: If you set complex goals for yourself, they become difficult to evaluate, and difficult to think about in a day to day context (“Did I eat the right ratio of protein to carbohydrates to fat to salt today?”). Note, incidentally, that a simple change can still be a big change.

Make changes slowly: It’s better to make changes slowly, and do a good job, than to attempt grandiose changes which are so demanding that they can never be successfully implemented. As the old proverb goes, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. As Benjamin Disraeli said, the secret of success is constancy of purpose; provided one holds constant to the purpose of becoming an effective researcher, small changes integrated over time will compound and result in tremendous improvement.

Evaluate the changes you make, and update your goals: To be effective, you have to evaluate the changes that you make. Say you set a goal to begin work by 6:30 am each day over the next week. This goal is of little use unless you keep a record of when you begin work each day, and then at the end of the week go through an evaluation process in which you first compare your goals to actual achievement, and then form an action plan, which may consist of either changing your goals, or of making a further change in behaviour in order to achieve the goal over the next week, or possibly doing both.

The process I’ve just described is, in my experience, a surefire way to personal change and growth. To conclude this section, I want to talk a little about some metaphors that I find useful when thinking about the process of personal change, and about some of the difficulties that crop up.

The first metaphor is that of the coach and a sporting team. As a researcher, one combines the roles of player and coach. A useful distinction to clarify thought is to divide your actions up into the roles of player and coach; think of having a player’s hat, and a coach’s hat. This metaphor sheds immediate light on one of the main difficulties faced in research, that of self-mastery and self-management. In a sporting team, there will always be difficult tasks and choices that, left to themselves, the players would be loath to take. Because there is an external force (the coach) imposing the actions, the difficult choices are often made anyway, to everyone’s long-run benefit. It’s easier to fool yourself and take the easy option than it is to fool anyone else; a good coach knows this, and works to prevent it. You need to become your own good coach.

The second metaphor is an idea from computer science known as the gradient descent algorithm. The gradient descent algorithm is a method for finding the maximum value of some function f(x) defined on a “landscape” of possible input values x. The way gradient descent works is to evaluate f(x) at some point, and then to make small perturbations x -> x’ in an attempt to find a value f(x’) larger than the initial f(x). The idea is that by following the local gradient we can find a maximum of the function. Self-improvement is similar, in that we make small changes in the way we work, evaluate whether this gives an improvement, and if so, continue moving in that direction. Indeed, this kind of change process can be applied in any area, not just personal development.

To finish off, I want to talk about one of the major pitfalls in achieving personal change, regression. Personally, I find it quite a downer when I begin developing some good new habits, things are going well, and then I find it all interrupted by some change in my routine. Maybe I go to a conference or on a holiday. My routine is disrupted, and when I return I find that the old good habits fall away. It’s tempting to get a bit down when this happens. While tempting, this, of course, is not a fruitful route to take.

I believe there are several ways one can combat this kind of regression. First of all, accept that this sort of regression will happen. We’re creatures of habit, and it’s easy to fall back into old habits, especially when those old habits require less immediate exertion on our own part. Second, it’s not a disaster when it happens. If you’ve learnt to do something once, you can learn to do it again; you just shouldn’t expect to be able to learn to do it overnight. It will take effort, just like it did the first time; a superficial effort is not enough, one must get back deeply into the process of change. The key is to ask oneself what good habits have been lost, and what sort of process can be used to get back into those habits. Then one has to pay the price again, in order to redevelop the habits. Personally, I am often far too impatient under these circumstances, and just expect to be able to go back to my old good habits without effort. The result, inevitably, is that I fail, and become unhappy about the failure, rather than paying the price necessary to get back into the good habits.

Note: This is part V of my continuing series. It, like the other parts, can for the most part be read independently. Part VI will arrive in the next day or two.

Aspects of research: self-development and the creative process

Research involves two main aspects, self-development and the creative process of research. We’ll discuss the specifics of each aspect below, but for now I want to concentrate on the problem of achieving balance between the two, for I believe it is a common and significant mistake to concentrate too much on one aspect to the exclusion of the other.

People who concentrate mostly on self-development usually make early exits from their research careers. They may be brilliant and knowledgeable, but they fail to realize their responsibility to make a contribution to the wider community. The academic system usually ensures that this failure is recognized, and they consequently have great difficulty getting jobs. Although this is an important problem, in this essay I will focus mostly on the converse problem, the problem of focusing too much on creative research, to the exclusion of self-development.

There are a lot of incentives for people to concentrate on creative research to the exclusion of self-development. Throughout one’s research career, but particularly early on, there are many advantages to publishing lots of papers. Within limits, this is a good thing, especially for young researchers: it brings you into the community of researchers; it gives you the opportunity to learn how to write well, and give good presentations; it can help keep you motivated. I believe all researchers should publish at least a few papers each year, essentially as an obligation to the research and wider community; they should make some contribution, even if only a small one, on a relatively unimportant topic.

However, some people end up obsessed with writing as many papers as possible, as quickly as possible. While the short-term rewards of this are attractive (jobs, grants, reputation and prizes), the long-term costs are significant. In particular, it can lead to stagnation, and plateauing as a researcher. To achieve one’s full potential requires a balancing act: making a significant and regular enough research contribution to enable oneself to get and keep good jobs, while continuing to develop one’s talents, constantly renewing and replenishing oneself. In particular, once one has achieved a certain amount of job security (a long-term or permanent job) it may make sense to shift the balance so that self-development takes on a larger role.

For many people (myself included) who have concentrated mainly on making creative research contributions earlier in their careers, this can be a difficult adjustment to make, as it requires changing one’s sense of what is important. Furthermore, there is a constant pull towards concentrating on research over self-development, since there are often short-term incentives to sacrifice self-development for research (“I’ve got to get this paper out now”), but rarely vice versa. To balance these tendencies, we need to remember that nobody, no matter how talented, is born an effective researcher; that distinction can only be obtained after a considerable amount of hard work and personal change, and there is no reason to suppose that just because one is now able to publish lots of papers that one has peaked as a researcher.

In my opinion, creative research is best viewed as an extension of self-development, especially an extension of a well-developed reading program. I don’t believe the two can be completely pried apart, as the two interact in interesting non-linear ways. I’m now going to talk in a little more detail about both processes, keeping in mind that the ultimate goal of research is new ideas, insights, tools and technologies, and this goal must inform the process of self-development.

I once heard Hofstadter’s Law of computer software engineering:

It will always take longer than you think, even when Hofstadter’s Law is taken into account.

Having just spent the day thinking and talking about fault-tolerant quantum computing, I think there’s a corresponding Hofstadter’s Law of quantum computer hardware engineering:

It will always be more difficult than you think, even when Hofstadter’s Law is taken into account.

An introductory lecture on fault-tolerant quantum computing, for a local mini-workshop on fault-tolerance that we’re holding at UQ today. This gives a very high level picture of fault-tolerance and the threshold theorem; with a few modifications, you could give this lecture to a group of bright first-year undergrads. Even after nearly 10 years, I find it an incredible result: you can build a reliable computer (quantum or classical) from faulty components.

Note that for some reason Acrobat choked on the file, so it’s just in Powerpoint, not pdf.

My essay on research effectiveness will continue tomorrow.

Self-discipline

Effective people are self-disciplined. They work both hard and smart, in the belief that you reap what you sow. How does one achieve such self-discipline? It’s a difficult problem. Wayne Bennett, one of the most successful coaches in the history of the sport of Rugby League, sums the problem up well when he says “I’ve had more trouble with myself than any other man I’ve ever met”.

It is a tempting but ultimately counterproductive fallacy to believe that self-discipline is merely a matter of will, of deciding what it is that you want to do, and then doing it. Many other factors affect self-discipline, and it’s important to understand those other factors. Furthermore, if you believe that it’s all a matter of willpower then you’re likely to get rather depressed when you fall short, sapping your confidenc, and resulting in less disciplined behaviour.

I now describe three factors important in achieving self-discipline.

The first factor is having clarity about what one wants to achieve, why one wants to achieve it, and how to go about achieving it. It’s easy to work hard if you’re clear about these three things, and you’re excited about what you’re doing. Conversely, I think the main cause of aimlessness and procrastination is when you lack clarity on one or more of these points.

The second factor affecting self-discipline is one’s social environment. Researchers are typically under little immediate social pressure to produce research results. Contrast this with the example of professional athletes, who often have an entire support system of coaches, managers and trainers in place, focused around the task of increasing their effectiveness. When a researcher stays out late, sleeps in, and gets a late start, no-one minds; when a professional athlete does, they’re likely to receive a blast from their coach.

Access to a social environment which encourages and supports the development of research skills and research excellence can make an enormous difference to all aspect of one’s research, including self-discipline. The key is to be accountable to other people. Some simple ways of achieving such accountability are to take on students, to collaborate with colleagues, or to set up mentoring relationships with colleagues.

The third factor affecting self-discipline is a special kind of honesty, honesty to oneself, about oneself. It’s extremely easy to kid ourselves about what we do and who we are. A colleague once told me of a friend of his who for some time used a stopwatch to keep track of how much research work he did each week. He was shocked to discover that after factoring in all the other activities he engaged in each day – interruptions, email, surfing the net, the phone, fruitless meetings, chatting with friends, and so on – he was averaging only half an hour of research per day. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was typical of many researchers. The good news, of course, is that building this kind of awareness lays the foundation for personal change, for achieving congruence between our behavioural goals and how we actually behave, in short, for achieving self-discipline.

Note: This essay is part of a longer essay series, but you don’t need to have read the earlier essays for this one to make sense.

Vision

Effective people have a vision of what they’d like to achieve. Ideally, such a vision incorporates both long-term values and goals, as well as shorter-term goals. A good vision answers questions like: What sort of researcher would I like to become? What areas of research am I interested in? How am I going to achieve competence in those areas? Why are those areas interesting? How am I going to continue growing and expanding my horizons? What short-term steps will I take to achieve those goals? How will I balance the long-term goals with the short-term realities of the situation I find myself in? For example, if you’re in a temporary job and need to get another job soon, it’s probably not such a great idea to devote all your time to learning some new subject, without any visible outcome.

A vision is not something you develop overnight. You need to work at it, putting time aside for the process, and learning to integrate it into your everyday life. It’s a challenging process, but over the long run it’s also extremely rewarding. History shows that great actions usually are the outcome of great purpose, even if the action that resulted was not the original purpose. Your vision doesn’t always need to be of a great purpose; it’s good to work on the little stuff, some of the time. But you should occasionally set yourself some big, ambitious goal, a goal that gets you excited, that makes you want to get up in the morning, and where you’ve developed a confidence in your own mind that you have a chance of achieving that goal. Such a great purpose inspires in a way that the humdrum cannot; it makes things exciting and worthwhile if you feel you’re working towards some genuinely worthy end. I believe this is particularly important in the more abstract parts of research (like theoretical physics), where it can require some work to make a personal, emotional connection to one’s own research. Having a clear vision of a great end is one very good way of making such a connection. When you don’t do this, you can get stuck in the rut of the everyday; you need to get out of that rut, to develop a bigger vision.

Finally, a good vision is not inflexible. It’s something that gets changed as you go along, never lightly, but frequently. The importance of having the vision is that it informs your everyday and every week decisions, giving you a genuinely exciting goal to work towards.

The Great Barrier Reef, by the way, is awesome. One of a short list of wonders of the world that I’ve seen, along with Milford Sound, Yosemite Valley, and the Grand Canyon.

The Daintree Rainforest is pretty amazing, also. There’s not many places where you can stand on a beautiful beach, with the world’s oldest rainforest on one side, beautiful mist-covered hills looming above you, and with coral reef on your other side.

All in all, a very good trip.

Principles of personal behaviour: proactivity, vision, and discipline

I believe that the foundation of effective research is to internalize a strong vision of what you want to achieve, to work proactively towards that vision, taking personal responsibility for successes and failures. You need to develop disciplined work habits, and to achieve balance between self-development and the actual creative research process.

Proactivity and personal responsibility

Effective people are proactive and take personal responsibility for the events in their lives. They form a vision of how they want their life to be, and work toward achieving that vision. They identify problems in their lives, and work toward solutions to those problems.

Isn’t this obvious, banal advice? I heard a story years ago in which a representative from McDonald’s was asked what gave McDonald’s the edge in the fast food industry. They replied that McDonald’s took care of the little things, like making sure that their restaurants and surrounds were always extremely clean. Representatives of other fast food companies replied incredulously that surely that was not the reason McDonald’s did so well, for “anyone could do that”. “But only McDonald’s does” was the response. The heart of personal effectiveness is not necessarily any special knowledge or secret: it is doing the basics consistently well.

When it comes to proactivity and responsibility, it seems to be incredibly difficult to internalize these principles and act on them consistently. Almost everyone says and thinks they are proactive and responsible, but how many of us truly respond to the force of external circumstance in the most proactive manner?

My belief is that the reason it is difficult to be consistently proactive and responsible is that over the short term it is often significantly easier to abdicate responsibility and behave in a reactive fashion. In my opinion, there are three basic ways this can occur.

The first way is to blame external circumstances for our problems. “We don’t have enough grant money.” “I have to teach too much.” “My supervisor is no good.” “My students are no good.” “I don’t have enough time for research.” When challenged on what actions we are taking to rectify the situation, we will claim that it’s the fault of other people, or of circumstances beyond our control, relieving ourselves of the burden of doing anything to solve the problem.

In short, we abdicate responsibility, preferring to blame others. This is easier over the short term, since it’s easier to complain than it is to take action, but is not a recipe for long-term happiness or effectiveness. Furthermore, we will usually deny that it is within our power to take actions to improve our situation. After all, if it was in our power, it would be us who is responsible, and our entire worldview is based upon blaming others for our own problems.

The second way of abdicating responsibility is to get caught up in displacement activities. These may give us a short-term fix, especially if they win us the approbation of other people, perhaps for responding to requests that they label urgent. Over the long run such displacement activities are ultimately unfulfilling, representing time lost from our lives.

The third way of abdicating responsibility is by getting down on yourself, worrying and feeling bad for not overcoming one’s difficulties. Winston Churchill spoke of the “black dog” of depression that overtook him during times when his political career was in eclipse. Personally, I sometimes get really down when things are not going well, and get caught up in a cycle of worry and analysis, without constructively addressing my problems. Of course, the right way to respond to a bad situation is not to beat yourself up, but rather to admit that, yes, things are going badly, to figure out exactly what problems you are facing, write out possible solutions, prioritize and implement them, without getting too worried or hamstrung by the whole process.

Why are these three options so attractive? Why do we so often choose to respond in this way to the challenges of life rather than taking things on with a proactive attitude that acknowledges that we’re responsible for our own life? What all three options share in common is that over the short-term abdicating responsibility for our problems is easier than taking responsibility for meeting the challenges of life.

A specific example that I believe speaks to many of us is when we’re having some sort of difficulty or conflict with another person. How many of us put off confronting the problem, preferring instead to hope that the problem will resolve itself? Yet, properly managed – a difficult thing to do, most likely requiring considerable preparation and aforethought – it’s nearly always better to talk with the person about the problem until you arrive at a mutual understanding of both your points of view, both sets of interests, and can resolve the issue on a basis of shared trust.

How can we learn to become proactive? I don’t know of any easy way. One powerful way is to be inspired by examples of proactive people. This can either be through direct personal contact, or indirectly through biographies, history, movies and so on. I like to set aside regular time for such activities. Another powerful tool for learning proactivity is to remind ourselves regularly of the costs and benefits of proactivity and responsibility versus reactivity and irresponsibility. These costs and benefits are easy to forget, unless you’re constantly being reminded that complaints, self-doubt, blame of others and of self are actually the easy short-term way out, and that chances are that you can construct a better life for yourself, at the cost of needing to do some hard work over the short term.

In the context of research, this means constantly reminding yourself that you are the person ultimately responsible for your research effectiveness. Not the institution you find yourself in. Not your colleagues, or supervisor. Not the society you are living in. All these things influence your research career, and may be either a help or a hindrance (more on that later), but in the final analysis if things are not working well it is up to you to take charge and
change them.

This is Part I of a lengthy (about 10,000 words) essay that I intend to post in parts over the next couple of weeks. I’ve tried to make the different parts more or less independent, so they can also be read separately as shorter essays (or blog posts!) At the end, I’ll repost it in a pdf format, where it comes to about 10 pages.

Overview

This essay is intended as a letter to both myself and others, to hold up in the sharpest possible terms an ideal of research I believe is worth working toward. I’ve deliberately limited the essay to 10 pages, hoping that the resulting omissions are compensated by the forced brevity. This is a rather personal essay; it’s not the sort of thing I’d usually make publicly available. I’ve made the essay public in order to heighten my commitment to the project, and in the hope that other people will find it stimulating, and perhaps offer some thoughts of their own.

A few words of warning. My primary audience is myself, and some of the advice is specific to my career situation [*], and therefore may not be directly applicable to others. And, of course, it’s all just my opinion anyway. I hope, however, that it’ll still be stimulating and helpful.

[*] I’m a theoretical physicist; I lead a small research group at a large Australian University; I have a permanent position, with no teaching duties for the next few years; I have several colleagues on the faculty with closely related interests.

The philosophy underlying the essay is based on a famous quote attributed to Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Underlying all our habits are models (often unconscious) of how the world works. I’m writing this essay to develop an improved personal model of how to be an effective researcher, a model that can be used as the basis for concrete actions leading to the development of new habits.

Fundamental principles

The fundamental principles of effective research are extremely similar to those for effectiveness in any other part of life. Although the principles are common sense, that doesn’t mean they’re common practice, nor does it mean that they’re easy to internalize. Personally, I find it a constant battle to act in accord with these principles, a battle requiring ongoing reflection, rediscovery and renewed commitment.

Integrating research into the rest of your life

Research is, of course, only a part of life, and must be understood in relation to the rest of life. The foundation of effective research is a strong motivation or desire to do research. If research is not incredibly exciting, rewarding and enjoyable, at least some of the time, then why not do something else that is? For the purposes of this essay, I’ll assume that you already have a strong desire to do research [*].

[*] People sometimes act or talk as though desire and motivation cannot be changed. Within limits, I think that’s wrong, and we can mold our own motivations. But that’s a subject for another essay.

Motivation and desire alone are not enough. You also need to have the rest of your life in order to be an effective researcher. Make sure you’re fit. Look after your health. Spend high quality time with your family. Have fun. These things require a lot of thought and effort to get right. If you don’t get them right, not only will your life as a whole be less good, your research will suffer. So get these things right, and make sure they’re integrated with your research life.

As an example, I once spent three years co-authoring a technical book, and for the final eighteen months I concentrated on the book almost exclusively, to the neglect of my health, relationships, and other research. It is tempting to ask the question “Was the neglect worth the benefits?” But that is the wrong question, for while the neglect paid short-term dividends in increased productivity, over the total period of writing the book I believe it probably cost me productivity, and it certainly did after the book was complete. So not only did I become less fit and healthy, and see my relationships suffer, the book took longer to complete than if I’d had my life in better order.