These days research in artificial intelligence is starting to grab every headline, and as a researcher working in the middle of this hype, I find myself reflecting a lot on what my true motivations are. I enjoy my work, but am also always weary of getting trapped in the inevitable rat race to start the next big AI company or come up with some big new idea in the field. To do something meaningful in any area, of course, hard work is extremely important. However, having a clear motivation focusing that work is perhaps even more critical.

For many, that motivation will be to create something that positively impacts the world. There are also practical considerations, such as money or power. I of course desire all of these things to some extent, but until recently, I’ve been struggling to piece together what truly motivates me as a scientific researcher. 

The Calvin and Hobbes series by Bill Watterson were my favorite books as a kid. At that age, most of the overarching social commentary was lost on me, but one thing that did stick with me is the magic of a child’s imagination. Calvin has a seemingly unending amount of free time, but always finds some wacky adventure to go on, either in nature or in his own head. Growing up as an only child in Cupertino with two busy working parents, I too had lots of time on my hands, and was determined to come up with new ways to entertain myself beyond just watching TV or playing video games.

Most days after school, all of the kids in my neighborhood would assemble to figure out our plan for the evening. Sometimes when ideas were running dry, we’d settle for something conventional, like shooting hoops in my friend’s driveway or playing a new board game. But often we’d come up with something interesting. Those evenings were filled with random wacky adventures, from sword fighting with large leaves to playing whole neighborhood golf with sticks and pinecones we found on the street. My favorite game we played was a rather ridiculous one where we would ride our bikes with the goal of getting totally lost, and then slowly find our way back home. We knew the neighborhood quite well, so getting lost wasn’t actually that easy, but was made much easier by the fact that this was before the era of smartphones which could instantly tell you where you were. Everyday was an adventure where we’d discover new things like a park we’d never seen before or a new game we could play with random things on the street. To clarify, nothing we ever discovered was truly very novel,  but it was new to us, and that’s all that really mattered. This constant piddling around was the highlight of my childhood. 

Of course, like many children, school was a big part of my life too. However, for most of my early education, I wasn’t very motivated. I did reasonably well, but found the strict structure of classes and assignments stifling, and I rarely enjoyed learning in school. The one big exception was story time: I still remember the feeling of excitement when the teacher would dim the lights, let us all sit in a circle, and read us a story just for the sake of it, with no strict lesson plan guiding them.

This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy learning in general. My mom loved puzzles, so we’d go on many happy neighborhood walks doing random logic puzzles, where I accidentally learned some math and started to love puzzles myself. I also read voraciously, and kept a little “research” journal where I collected lots of random facts I’d read about, like how big the sun was or how many different animal species lived in the Amazon rainforest. I learned a lot through random exploration, but school just never did it for me in my early years. 

That started to change in early high school, where I had a couple of wonderful American history and literature teachers who made their classes feel like the story time I loved so much in elementary school. Learning the story of my country in so much detail was eye opening. I especially thought that analyzing the implications of decisions made centuries ago was fascinating, because it inspired me to think about what might matter in making similar decisions today. Most of all though, it was fun! Instead of learning a bunch of random facts or formulas, this was a thrilling human story where all of us children were the final chapter. 

My dad is a chemical engineer, and he always wondered why I showed so little interest in science and engineering growing up. He wasn’t the type to steer me in any particular direction, but found it strange that I didn’t have that same constant curiosity about how the world worked that he did. Looking back on those times, I’ve realized that my lack of interest was at least partially due to the way science was taught in school. We would spend a lot of time memorizing details about various scientific phenomena, and occasionally doing some experiments to confirm the facts we learned, but I never truly understood what being a scientist or engineer meant. 

In the summer between my sophomore and junior year, someone recommended that I read the book Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman. The book is a series of entertaining anecdotes about the life of Richard Feynman, a famous theoretical physicist in the first half of the twentieth century, the golden age of physics. Some of these stories are about physics, but many of them are not. However, what ties all of these stories together is how strongly they convey Feynman’s infectious curiosity and enthusiasm for learning new things. His motivation as a scientist was seemingly driven mostly by the pleasure of finding something out, or building something new. This included areas of study as disparate as learning how to translate Mayan hieroglyphics, picking locks at Los Alamos, and becoming a top notch Samba drummer. When working on a problem, whether it had important and broad societal implications was secondary. The journey of discovery was its own reward. 

Reading this book changed the way I thought about science. Instead of viewing science as a set of statements about nature to be internalized, I got excited about the process of scientific discovery itself. When learning about atomic structure in chemistry or physics for example, I started to spend a lot of time reading about the history of how people had discovered all these wonderful things about atoms: Who first provided evidence that atoms existed at all? How did we go from this abstract understanding to learning that most of an atom is empty space? How did we figure out what the charges within an atom are and how they are distributed? How did we measure the masses of all of these particles? When viewed in this way, any random fact that I was told to memorize became a thrilling saga of discoveries that culminated in that fact. 

I’ve found this way of thinking wonderfully useful as a researcher. Instead of just focusing on experiment results, I spend a lot of time thinking about how other researchers came up with the ideas they did. What series of prior work inspired them? Why was the time ripe for their discovery? What were all the bad ideas they must have tried before stumbling upon the one they published? Thinking about these questions is not only helpful in developing one’s own ability to do original research, but also makes research far more exciting. There’s an unfortunate incentive in scientific communication to write papers as if the key idea simply appeared out of thin air, making the main purpose of the paper an argument to convince the reader of the correctness or utility of the hypothesis or algorithm being presented. While this is of course valuable, it fails to capture what makes scientific research so exciting to me: the meandering, chaotic, and inventive process of stumbling upon ideas and finally finding something that works.

I often come back to both Surely You’re Joking and Calvin and Hobbes when I have a crisis in motivation. I’ve come to appreciate more nuance in the messages in Calvin and Hobbes in my adult life, especially the value of detachment from consumerism.  Focusing on seeking wonderful experiences rather than materialistic possessions deeply resonates with me. Today I still find that getting lost in fully unstructured nature adventures, similar to those Calvin regularly embarks on, is my favorite way to mentally reset, and rethink how I want to live my life.

I’ve also started to think more about how these books have shaped how I want to develop in my career. Feynman, much like six year old Calvin, had an almost childlike curiosity about the world. He had a disregard for authority and societal norms, and viewed life in a playful way that emphasized the importance of meandering exploration just as much as focusing deeply on a goal. Trying to emulate these philosophies help me feel grounded as a researcher in an increasingly competitive field with dramatic advances happening everyday. It’s tempting to get lost in the endless grind towards possible fame and fortune. But increasingly, I’m focusing more on the playful joy of learning something new or trying silly little experiments than getting wrapped up in a grand vision of what I feel like I should be working towards.