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courtesy of ceratopsian palaeontologist and home brewing consultant andy farke here s what he had to say about them your recent post spurred me to snap these photos of a burrowing owl doing backwards head things there are a few individuals at the living desert zoo in palm desert california it s a super cool enclosure in which you can walk into an aviary habitat that has free roaming burrowing owls prairie dogs a turkey vulture and a few other cool north american critters even though the san diego zoo is most famous i am of the firm opinion that both living desert and the santa barbara zoos are objectively better they have an amazing variety of semi obscure animals large and naturalistic enclosures cool up close opportunities and both mostly avoid having kiosks placed every three feet selling cheap plastic crap which has always perplexed me about organizations that purportedly promote conservation at some point i m going to have to stop just posting photos of these weirdos and start writing about what s going on and how and why doi 10 59350 ymkee 8d771 posted by mike taylor filed in necks some kind of bird 2 comments three four quotes about doing good work january 4 2026 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 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 doi 10 59350 hg0ef ajx78 posted by matt wedel filed in doing the work navel blogging leave a comment do it yourself january 1 2026 do it yourself i don t mean that as a descriptive phrase it s a complete sentence in the imperative do it yourself pick up the pencil pen stylus paintbrush airbrush mouse keyboard scissors rolling pin hammer drill wrench saw welding torch sewing needle instrument guitar pick pickaxe shovel dumbbell jump rope paddle piton hiking pole do that thing your thing the one you love or the one you ve been putting off the one you re afraid of the one that you were told you couldn t do the one you ve always dreamed of doing don t wait for things to be perfect perfect isn t coming the world isn t going to be perfect conditions won t be perfect you won t be perfect we don t get perfect here every baby is a few hours away from a dirty diaper and every sunset is tinged with wildfire smoke and cow farts we get the perfection of things found in the dirt you have to go find them dig them up dust them off learn to see the perfection in them let them be perfect for you don t wait for inspiration go find it the only reliable map to inspiration is the one on your hands written in graphite ink paint talc grease plaster soil flour sap chalk oil clay sawdust or sweat punctuated with paper cuts blisters callouses scrapes welts torn nails and skinned knuckles the muses value sacrifice get to work on your own and maybe you ll tempt them to show up and maybe not they re fickle half feral and a quarter trickster but at least you ll have been working someone told you that you couldn t do it wouldn t do it don t have what it takes that it was too hard too time consuming too important too frivolous where are those words now gone they vibrated in the air for a few seconds bounced around inaudibly for a few seconds more and then got diluted to nothingness in the random movement of air molecules if you re still hearing them still carrying them still worrying at them or worrying about them let them go feed them into the furnace of your action and watch them curl to ash no one knows what you re capable of even you don t know what you re capable of not yet start running and you can run a little farther every day start climbing and you ll build muscle on the way up start making and the things you make will get better start learning start teaching yourself and become unstoppable push past the end of comfort and you ll find that your real limits are a lot farther out than you or anyone else suspected if you find your limits at all it will be out there get going be a fox omnivorous clever crafty relentless find people who do the thing better than you can yet and learn from them your next teacher might be down the street across the planet or dead for millennia study their practice their tools their techniques hunt for new points of view and new angles of attack lots of animals sharpen their teeth against each other find someone who sharpens you a mentor a partner an accountabilibuddy a friendly rival can t do the thing right now get ready hit the books hit the gym study the masters make a plan build that sled now so you ll be ready when the snow falls be humble the universe is complex life is complex people are complex you re complex but you re also your own worst enemy you can t learn from someone you ve decided has nothing to teach you you won t ask a question when you think you already know the answer question everything is only good advice if you apply it to your own certainties first hold your certainties loosely but cherish good questions pamper them like pandas see if you can get them to breed be proud own your inner gold maybe jogging makes you feel like you re going to die at least you re out here jogging maybe all your drawings look flat but you re putting in the pencil miles to get better maybe you haven t found a good ending for chapter 4 but chapters 1 3 are in the rearview measure your success by the footstep by the rep the line of ink or the line of text and not only at the finish line almost everything you might make or do is iterative so iterate and own your progress you can be proud of your thing not because it s perfect but because you did it you invested in yourself and became a person who can do that thing just remember that even better things are out there waiting for you to sweat them into existence don t duck the struggle or outsource it steer into it the hard lifting at the edge of your capacity builds the most muscle a lot of people won t make their things they ll buy someone else s find something close enough or do without they ll never find out how good it might have been and how strong they might have become if they d done it themselves or they ll prompt a machine and it will grind up a bunch of other people s things and feed it back to them shoplifted ingredients puréed into baby food in time those people may forget how to chew if they ever learn at all their choice not yours you ll already be up in the foothills maybe a little winded but breathing clear air and climbing steadily the thing is not the point it never was you are the point just as you spend graphite to make drawings and flour to make cakes you spend drawings and cakes and practice sessions mornings in the classroom afternoons in the garage and evenings in the gym to become someone who can draw or bake run a 10k play a concerto give cpr rebuild an engine speak a new language get an orchid to bloom write a sonnet climb an ice wall let go of an old hurt find a new passion the things you make or do are just leaves you are the tree making leaves is what you do the next batch will be better and making them will make you better start now set an achievable goal based on practice not product celebrate showing up especially if it helps you keep showing up go a little farther each time one more push up one more paragraph one more stitch one more swing build momentum get some early wins on the board hold yourself accountable don t expect perfection expect the opposite stumbling and falling short doesn t make you a failure it makes you human useful failures are symptoms of trying keep trying get back up and check the tape study the fall learn from it try not to let it happen the same way next time recognize the off ramps that distract you and barricade them you are the original neural network learn from your inputs the inner critic the one that tells you to stop you suck you can t do it you ll never get there why even start like any voice it needs air take up your tool of choice and you choke it use up all the oxygen when you practice and leave the inner critic gasping on the floor you may end up gasping on the floor too that s okay the critic thinks life is about staying down you know i...