Recently, I asked two of my students/postdocs what they were working on. One answered, when referring to a paper we discussed together, that

“My brain is burning, melting, and hurting after day 1 of acquaintance with xxx, but it’s a really beautiful thing. Still need to play with examples to understand things better (xxx), but what a way to do induction, omg!”

which, you know, is the thing you want to hear. The second answered that he had an idea for an old conjecture that many people had been working on, essentially since the inception of the field..

I said ok (sceptically).

He told me the idea.

And suddenly it seemed possible.

Like all of a sudden you see the mountaintop in the distance, and see the real possibility of scaling it. While I will not spoiler on whether it works, I should say that this is the moment I love. Not the solution, not the feeling of being done (honestly that lasts a second, and is kind of disappointing when it is over) it is the idea I love. The moment that something goes from “impossible” to “maybe”.

And even just maybe. Most of the time, that fails. Even in the area I am supposed to be expert in, it is at least 90 percent failure. But I love the trying part, the idea part still. Not only because it leads to a solution, but because going from impossible to possible is a huge step. And you kind of owe it to the idea to try it. Because how else do you know it is worth it.