>>12641329I'm trying to figure this out myself, but looking at my friends with incredibly successful research careers, here are a couple of trends I have found:
1) Ability to form abstractions and unify wide range of research into a coherent narrative (helps them identify useful problems to tackle)
2) Ability to analyze a given observation, break it down into the simplest parts, and figure out exactly what the problem is (helps them debug and design good experiments)
3) Ability to come up with counterfactuals and different conditions in which the problem wouldn't happen (helps debug and findingsolutions to the problem). This is where creativity comes in.
4) Most importantly, the discipline to put 10x effort into the problem than anyone else. It's almost like a leap of faith.
