From Jonathan Mayhew’s blog:
A facebook friend of mine, Robert Archambeau, a very productive scholar, noted recently that advice on how to be productive is useless. What he said was “if you wanted to do it, you’d already be doing it, and if you don’t want to do it, you probably shouldn’t.”
This statement makes a lot of sense to me. My productivity improved greatly thanks to a) Jonathan’s advice and b) psychoanalysis. However, I strongly believe that a research scholar is this very weird human being who lives and breathes for research. There is no external goal and reward that she or he seeks because the process is the reward. Doing research is as natural as eating, drinking, or sleeping to such a person. Just like psychological problems can disrupt the natural eating and sleeping processes (think bulimics and insomniacs, for instance), they can prevent a scholar from doing all he or she can research-wise.
My analyst asked me once, “What would happen if you did as much research as you wanted?”
“I think I wouldn’t be able to handle so much happiness,” I blurted out. “I’d die in a paroxysm of ecstasy.”
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