One, it really it takes much longer than you think it does or should, and you have to teach yourself to be patient waiting it out because trying to push or rush actually will lead you to the wrong result. So you need to be patient. You need to be willing to sort of work narrowly and focus in a focused way on a topic, possibly work in a mentor's shadow for longer than you feel like you should, but the result is at the end you'll really emerge much stronger.

I think another thing that I think ends up being really important is commitment and perseverance. So it takes a lot of steadiness through lots of ups and downs and rejections to continue to do this. It's hard to have that kind of commitment, and I think it's important to ask where it is your commitment comes from? Why are you studying the question you're studying? Why is it important to you?

I think it's really fundamental thing that someone has to have a fairly deep commitment to stick it out. So I know that's something that comes up maybe not talked about as much, but the more the depth of your belief, the more you're committed to it, I think the better your chance of making it through to the other side.

To me the single best thing you can have is a really good idea. A good idea doesn't mean a particular novel thought or hypothesis to test. A good idea really is a clever way to make a difficult problem testable. That's what's hard. Is to take something difficult and figure out how to test it in a convincing way.