Major inspirations include Sherlock Holmes, this Instructable by AngryRedhead, https://www.instructables.com/Researching-a-Research-Paper-Quickly-and-Effective/ (I looked at it to see where our processes differ – yes in some ways, no in others), You Can Do It! by Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas, Girl Scout Badges & Signs by Girl Scouts of America (1980s version, referring to the process whereby badges are earned, which is really interesting), health challenges, and facing seemingly impossible challenges in my past. Digging for what information I need has not been a simple or straightforward process ever. It’s way more like fighting a battle or a war of attrition than scratching my head with a pencil and citing memorized facts about some long-forgotten scientific trivia. Collect your motivation before you begin.
I start with some problem that’s plaguing me. Something that’s been a colossal pain in the rear for a while and that I’ve tried to solve with the usual means but has not responded as I have wanted it to. Note that if you have had problems for a while, they tend to breed more problems, so I suggest starting anywhere. It’ll feed good feedback into all the other connected areas.
Where I like to look: every resource I can find. Libraries in my area, online libraries, bookstores, websites, Librarything. Bibliographies of books can sometimes help. My spirituality, too, I don’t discount that, but I think whatever yours is has to be up to you and your business only. People can be good sources of information or even sounding boards if you have trustworthy ones in your life. You can sometimes find internet forum threads that answer your questions too, seek them. That said, trial and error counts for a lot too. Whatever works after a long time of figuring out what doesn’t is something you might want to write down.
At this point questions might start to crop up. Write these down. They’re important and lead you down further avenues of research. Find a dead end? Research another question or research the same one again but differently. Speaking of writing stuff down, whatever you write down or type needs to be legible 20 years from now and understandable. You will not remember what you think will jog your memory unless you’re some kind of savant, so what’s the point in putting in all that work only to make yourself start back at square one if you ever need to look back at your research? Try to keep it in some semblance of order as you go also. Collect your evidence, but also condense everything you can so you don’t spend hours reading it unless you really, really have to. My way of writing this stuff down is to pretend I’m speaking to an antagonistic audience on an anonymous internet forum. Keep it short. Keep it simple. Get to the point. Get ready for the rotten tomatoes!
One asset you should strive to build here: scientific literacy. Understanding what a good source of information or evidence is versus what isn’t will stop you from wasting a lot of your time chasing so-called information that’s about as reliable as The Onion. I don’t believe scientific literacy is as simple as it seems either, and it’s something I’m working on. It’s important. Sometimes I thank my lucky stars and when figuring out whether a scientific paper’s conclusions are garbage since the researcher drew the incorrect conclusions from the evidence cited in that paper is generally part of those times, though I know I can always get better at it and when pursuing the truth, every effort to get better at finding it is worth it. Learning about lies, damn lies, and statistics, learning about correlation versus causation, accuracy versus precision, significant figures, bias, logic, mathematics, all that good stuff: oh my. Learn it. It’s worth taking night school classes in Science, even, if what I just said went straight over your head. Your life will change.
Another major asset: finishing the books you start. You will probably start to accumulate books that you think are worth reading. And to me, thanks to the Librarians franchise (which I suggest!) I see movies, TV shows and video games as “books,” they’re still stories and they count. They will not read themselves. It doesn’t matter if it takes you months or years but GET. THROUGH. THEM. You’ll get nowhere if you don’t. I speak from experience.
Now here’s where in my opinion the researchers for school or even paid researchers differ from people researching this stuff to solve problems in their own lives. The time and effort input. In college or at a workplace, you go, you do the thing, you submit the paper or pull the hours, you go home, job done. But the problem might be solved a la Mediocrates: “meh, good enough.” When it isn’t. In my experience the only way to really get familiar with a problem, familiar enough to destroy it, whip it, get it gone, or even to understand it much better and get significantly closer to solving or mitigating the problem is to sink a time investment of at least seven years. That long of trial and error, thorough research, getting all the help you can, living it, breathing it, mastering the intricacies. In my experience that long is really helpful for everything you care about too. Those years are the “git gud, scrub!!!” of research. I really, really, really suggest at least sinking a year or so into it.
If you do pull such a time investment, and care that much, the thorough but summarized notes you take can become a very valuable library in themselves. I like organizing such a thing much like I said in the Making The Most of Instructables post. Remember the two rules of computing: backup, and backup. Also pacing yourself and trusting yourself to pick up the work where you let it go in order to rest is very important so you don’t burn out. Why go through all this effort? Consider the long term implications.
New Book of Days 
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