"But it turns out the novel discovery is just a side effect. You don't make novel discoveries by trying to make novel discoveries."

"research is simply a continuation of something we already naturally do: learning."

"Learning happens when you understand something that someone else already understands. Research happens when you understand something that nobody else understands yet."

"he remarked: ""Honestly, I don’t think humanity knows the answer to this question yet."""

"Research, I realized, is what happens as a byproduct when you try to understand something and hit the bounds of what humanity currently knows"

"These observations of strangeness, where pieces of the understanding puzzle don't fit, lead to exploring beyond what's known."

"At some point, after having gone extraordinarily deep in an uncharted direction, they were each able to turn their understanding into an explanatory model, resulting in a tremendous novel discovery."

"Put another way, the generating function for novel work is trying really hard to deeply understand something until you pass through the edge of current human understanding, and then continuing imaginatively onwards."

"Of course, that understanding needs to be augmented with a model of what’s already known. Without such a model, you may think you're discovering new things at the edge, but you're actually in the center rediscovering what's known."

"The playfulness came from inside, from curiosity, enjoyment, humor, amazement."

"Now I realize that it's a creative process, a process of actively constructing explanations of how things work."

"And second, it's common to mistakenly set the outcome of a process as your goal, as I did by believing I should try to make novel discoveries. The thing to emulate is the process, not the outcome."

"And second, it's common to mistakenly set the outcome of a process as your goal, as I did by believing I should try to make novel discoveries. The thing to emulate is the process, not the outcome."