You know that if you are too risky in your research you will get nothing done. Or you can play it safe and reap rewards for doing essentially the same thing over and over again, but that’s really not getting much done and you have to force yourself not to do that. You have to find the stuff that pushes the edges for you, and to do that you have to be honest and say, “What can I personally tackle?”. Also, you have to know the times you live in. Is there enough information for me to make progress here? When do you yourself say you are not going to be able to solve this? So you have to introspect and that is the good part. But you have to guess too, and you could guess wrong. There are no guarantees.
(By Larry Abbott, a theoretical neuroscientist @Columbia University)
