Don't Do Research. Go on a quest.

It's Thursday morning, and I see an email in my inbox. Confident I know what it contains, I open it with excitement. I'm right. It's answering a major problem I have.

This email taught me that there is an unspoken rule to research. But not just research alone. This unspoken rule works for any aspect of your career or family life. And it's simple to remember:

Go on quests

In graduate school, I was asked to go on a quest. It's the end of my second year, and I have been asked to propose a research idea. I give a 10 minute presentation on some initial findings and some suggestions on what I could do with them. My professors ()two of the most prominent in the field) respond that the idea isn't good enough yet, but it has potential. "Why don't you spend the summer thinking about where this idea could go, what other data you'd like to collect. Come back with a more developed plan and a budget of what it would take to accomplish it."

Unfortunately, I didn't realize I was being called on a quest. That was one of two research ideas I had proposed, and I decided to pursue the other one. I was more attracted to the other project because I knew it could be done. It was easier. The idea I turned away from was risky. Who knew if I would find anything?

But looking back, I realized that my professors were the Spanish monarchy asking Columbus what he needed to sail West. Columbus had proposed a risky idea, but if it worked there was a huge payoff. Importantly, Columbus didn't just think it could be done. He was convinced it could be. And that's what makes a quest.

A quest is defined by a boldness of purpose. The boldness comes in two parts. First, confidence that the quest's end exists. There is a fountain of youth or a Holy Grail. In research, it's a confidence that the answer can be found. In business, it's the boldness that your product will solve problems. Second, there's a confidence that you are the one who can reach it. That confidence doesn't have to be that you are the only one, that you are the chosen. But just that there's no reason why you couldn't accomplish it.

If I could name one characteristic that my most successful colleagues have, it's this ability to identify a quest and go for it. So many times in graduate school I would talk to friends and they would describe the quest they were on. To me, it sounded like they thought there were actual dragons in the world and they would be the ones to discover them. There was no way that would work and it would take so long to do. And I saw some fail. But then they would identify their next quest, and they set off. They all accomplished great things.

And as I reflect on it, I realize that I've seen the rewards from quests. One of my first research projects was about smartphones and child injuries. I had read a Wall Street Journal article explaining that there was a possible link between parents using smartphones and children getting injured. Being a parent, and seeing my phone affect my interactions with my child, I was convinced this was true. So I started a quest to find the answer. And I was convinced I could find it. I spent a year looking for a way to track the rollout of 3G, and I found it. Once I had that, I needed the injury data. I knew where to find it, but when I asked they denied me. They claimed they couldn't share it because of privacy concerns. So I pushed a little harder, suggesting a way to achieve both of our goals. And, surprisingly, they agreed. I wrote a great paper that got a lot of attention in the press. I had achieved my quest.

It feels mystical, but it's like having a quest mindset somehow makes that thing appear. It's obviously not true that just believing Excalibur exists means you'll somehow find it. But it is the case that if you believe you can answer a question with data, somehow you will find the dataset you need.

This email was the result of a mini-quest. I was working on a project that was promising, but I knew it could be better if I had just a little more data. The data I was using came from a government ministry in Haiti, and I knew they had what I needed. I just didn't know if they would give it to me.

So I turned it into a quest. I looked for someone to contact and found the email address for the ministry's data manager. Then I just asked him if I could have the data I needed. I wondered if I could really be that bold, and the whole day I expected to find a response denying my request. But the next day he responded and said he would assemble the data for me. And less than a week later the email came. Attached was all the data I needed, I plugged it into my project that night, and the results were amazing.

Now that sounds like a trivial quest. All I did was send an email. But many people underestimate what they could accomplish if they were just 10% bolder. If they sent that email. If they applied for that grant. If they approached that person. If they started that quest.

And isn't that the point of research? What is a question without a quest?