It's always clear from the outside

I started reading “Art and Fear” by David Bayles and Ted Orland recently. While it’s nominally about art, I was struck by how similar the described experiences felt to what I’ve lived through during my PhD so far. Particularly, the following passage stood out to me:

“After all, you know better than anyone else the accidental nature of much that appears in your art, not to mention all those elements you know originated with others (and even some you never even intended but which the audience has read into your work). From there it’s only a short hop to feeling like you’re just going through the motions of being an artist. It’s easy to imagine that real artists know what they’re doing, and that they—unlike you—are entitled to feel good about themselves and their art. Fear that you are not a real artist causes you to undervalue your work. The chasm widens even further when your work isn’t going well, when happy accidents aren’t happening or hunches aren’t paying off. If you buy into the premise that art can be made only by people who are extra-ordinary, such down periods only serve to confirm that you aren’t.”

You can replace “art” and “artist” with “science” and “scientist” - or any other occupation really - and the essence of this remains. Reading a paper published in Nature or Science, it is all too easy to see only the final product, the amazing discoveries made by genius scientists, pushing the limits of human knowledge. I remember visiting my first conference, intimidated by the scores of clearly much-smarter-than-me researchers around me, looking at posters I did not understand and thinking “wow - these people have it figured out, what am I doing here?”.

What we forget is that the work was done by people like you and me. They may be more intelligent (whatever that means), or even more talented, or more organized, but they are only human. And humans fail more often than not. Even the most polished paper or poster or essay (or artwork) went through a phase of happy accidents, unhappy bug findings, failed analyses, or botched figure drafts. But only we know about these. From the outside, you only ever see the result.