Aidan Swope

You mention paper ides, so I will answer assuming this is about research.

In my experience, picking a good research topic up front is extremely important, since actually testing your idea in depth will take a lot of time and there's a significant chance that once you do that you'll have to discard it anyway. So I think a period of flipping through project ideas without long-term commitment to any of them is pretty helpful for feeling out whether a given idea is worth the time and risk. Just make sure that you really seriously consider each idea you're trying out rather than just dropping it for something else, and write down what... (read more)

Make a point of not engaging in the standard academic research performances, and figure out how to cure cancer anyway.

I hear this a lot, but it doesn't seem to be very effective for people who do genuinely want to improve the world in tangible ways through academic research. The direction in fields like math and physics seems to be overwhelmingly in the direction of massive collaboration, and Symbols can be effective ways of organizing collective action on a hard problem. People joke about spending hundreds of dollars going to conferences just to spend the whole time falling asleep at talks and having coffee with strangers -- but everyone also has a story... (read more)