Three Four quotes about doing good work

None of these were intended by their creators to be about research; even Marie Curie’s line was about her education. But each of them touched a nerve for me. Also, since they’re not explicitly about research, you may find them applicable to other areas of life as well, whether you’re a researcher or not.

“One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.”

– Marie Curie, quoted in “Madam Curie: A Biography by Eve Curie”, p. 116

Oh man, do I feel this. I’m proud of my output to date, but I don’t spend a lot of time enjoying the sensation of having written a bunch of papers. My feelings about my past work fall, to varying degrees for various papers, into three bins:

• thank goodness that’s done so I don’t have to do it again, because it was a lot of work;
• thank goodness that’s done so I can just cite it now, and get on with other things;
• eesh, I wish done that a bit better.

It’s not that I never look back fondly on what I’ve done. I just have some distance from it, like it was done by someone else. I joke about Past Matt and Future Matt, but they’re pretty constant and often useful mental constructs. And my own work, out of all the work in the world, has this unique character: I know for dead certain that the guy who did it knew less than I do now and was a less-experienced writer. Eventually that starts to rankle, no matter how good the paper was at the time.

There is a less healthy side to this, for me and for a lot of people that I know, where it becomes hard for us to own the good work that we’ve done — or take a healthy, deserved break — because we’re always in pursuit of the next thing. I don’t know what to do about that; I’m fortunate to have a partner who pushes me to own my accomplishments and take my breaks, but it’s a skill or a viewpoint I’m still working on cultivating in myself.

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”

– Robert Hughes, “Art: Modernism’s patriarch”, Time magazine, June 10, 1996

For ‘artist’, I think you can sub in pretty much any other field of human endeavor, public or private, solo or group effort, transient or permanent: scientist, educator, athlete, writer, counselor, mystic, programmer, diarist, craftsperson, parent, engineer, explorer, hobbyist. To me it pairs perfectly with a quote from Paul Graham which was part of my email signature for many years: “The people I know who do great work think that they suck, but that everyone else sucks even more.”

Again, there is the potential for unhealthy self-doubt here, and an unwillingness to fairly acknowledge our growth and own our inner gold. As Oliver Burkeman wrote in “Meditations for Mortals”, if any of us met our inner critic at a party, we’d think that person was impossible rude, socially inept, and in some way fundamentally broken. But I like to focus on the positive aspect: each of us is a tree, making leaves in our chosen fields of endeavor, and since we tend to get better at that over time, it’s hard to deny the possibility — or inevitability — that we’ll make even better leaves in the future. Just as I know that Past Matt was less knowledgeable and a less-experienced writer than I am, I know that Future Matt will think of me the same way. Part of me thinks, can’t I skip over all of this laborious becoming and just be that guy? But the truth is, there’s no path to a more capable Future Matt that doesn’t lead through hard work; trying to duck the effort is only going to turn me into a Wall-E chair person.

“It’s hard to build momentum if you keep dividing your attention.”

– James Clear, 3-2-1 Newsletter, September 25, 2025

Hammer, nail, WHAM!! This quote crystallizes why 2025 was my year of saying no. Since 2021 I’d said yes to almost every single invitation to collaborate that came down the pike. I don’t have many regrets about that; it got me on a lot of cool projects and I made a lot of new friends along the way. But it also meant that I didn’t get much of my own work done and out. Since last January I’ve been keeping a list of the projects and invitations that I’ve turned down — not just papers but conferences, leadership positions, and so on — and it’s really clarified for me just how much I’ve been Balkanizing my attention. I can be fourth or fifth author on a dozen papers or lead author on one or two; having done a lot of the former, I’m now going to lean into attempting the latter (again — for the first half of my career, solo or lead-authored papers dominated my output). I’m sure there’s a healthy balance to be struck, but for now I’m trying to swing the pendulum back toward my own projects. (And for any collaborators I’ve turned down in the past year: thank you for letting me come play, I had a blast, I’m sorry for whatever delays I introduced, let’s collaborate again sometime when I’m better-adjusted. It’s not you, it’s most definitely me.)

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I wrote the first draft of this post a few months ago, and it sat in the drafts folder, waiting for me to find images to go with it. I definitely had images in mind when I wrote the draft, but whatever visual inspiration I had at the time seems to have permanently evaporated. Eventually I realized that it was silly to leave a perfectly good draft just sitting there because I couldn’t think of pictures to back up its rather philosophical points.

But was it “a perfectly good draft”? Coming back to it after some months, I couldn’t help but read it through the lens of another quote that I’d come across in the meantime, one which has been ringing in my head like an alarm:

“Most successful people are just a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.”

– Andrew Wilkinson, Twitter, April 26, 2021

I reread the draft with mounting skepticism, and a tinge of discomfort. I was tempted to either junk the whole thing, or edit it to match my new, enlightened perspective. But I think the more honest thing is to admit that enlightenment is a moving target, or perhaps an ocean I could never drink all of, and this post — in both its draft version, and the one you’re reading now — is just a cobblestone on my path.

It’s oddly and perhaps perversely navel-gazey to think about doing my work so that I can become a better version of myself. In my best moments, when I’m in flow and it feels like I am a conduit funneling the mysteries of the past into words and images in my research notebook, I’m not thinking of myself at all, but only about the things I’m studying. And when I stop for the occasional meal or bio-break, or at the end of the day, I’m positively tingly with the exhilaration of discovering new things. Thinking of myself — like I’m doing right now — is a symptom of being very far from the work. And maybe that’s the conclusion that I’ve been unwittingly building toward, through the whole protracted development of this post. The best and surest way to quiet that anxiety that runs like a barbed vine through most of this post is to stop worry about myself, and even stop worrying about the work, and simply do it. Not because it will make me better (although it might, if I can get out of my own way, and out of my own head), but because it’s my calling and my privilege to get to do it.

Source: https://svpow.com/2026/01/04/four-quotes-about-doing-good-work/