In research, you never know in advance what the answers will be.
You can give your best guess, you can even give a detailed justification for why things should turn out that way.
But whenever you assume you know the results in advance, the universe has a habit of kicking you hard.
Everything is an experiment. It will work out however it works out. The skill then lies in responding to the results, asking more questions, refining your methodology and trying again.
The interesting stuff lies in the unexpected, and it’s when things go wrong that you can develop your skills as a researcher.
So if you are looking for that one big research idea, or that one methodology, you’re doing it wrong because you can’t predict how things will work out. Try something small, treat it as an experiment, and build from there.
Thesis Writing Tutorial Videos
The painless PhD (video course)
Just because a PhD is difficult, that doesn’t mean it has to be painful.
The painless PhD is a video course designed to show you exactly what is required at every stage of your PhD.
Great advice James. I learned to be a better historian by having to adapt to unexpected research results. As they say on the golf course, the best players are not defined by the ability to hit a perfect shot every time, but by the ability to recover from a bad shot when it happens.
True. Most of us at one time or another are put under pressure to come up with THE answer. The answer that we “know” is right or the answer that we and our peers have been expecting for years.
I think an important ability as a researcher is to be intrigued when things don’t work out as we planned more often than we are disappointed.
Thank you for this excellent post.