The word "science" is ambiguous. It denotes two very different kinds of activities.
The first is the lofty intellectual ideal of solving a major problem, winning a Nobel, and getting your name in the history books. The second is the daily grind of reading other people's papers, providing peer review, writing grant proposals, and generally interfacing with other humans as a cog in a grand machine. The second is in some sense "easier" than the first. It's a lot more work, takes a lot more time, but it's a relatively straightforward (if often tedious) process that pretty much anyone can do with enough diligence. The first is a lot more fun, can often be done while showering, but is also fraught with risk and dependent on luck. You have to find just the right problem at just the right time under just the right circumstances. You can spend your time slogging, or you can spend your time buying intellectual lottery tickets and hope that lightning strikes, but you can't do both, at least not at at the same time.
The good news is that engaging in the daily slog is often (but not always) good preparation for and improves the odds of having lightning strike. So as a practical matter, that is often a good place to start. You might feel as if you're wasting your time reading everybody else's bullshit papers instead of writing the next Nobel prize winner yourself, but you're not. You're actually an essential part of the process even if you don't end up with the glory. And some day you just might be facing a really hard problem and go, "Wait a minute, this seems kinda like that thing I remember Dr. Arglebargle talking about three years ago, except that he missed this one detail..." and that's when the magic happens.
From Bill Watterson's commencement speech at Kenyon College in 1990. I was lucky to read this when I was graduating and it changed my whole career path. I am now very happy and very boring:
"Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.
To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble."
I always considered the current culture of cultivated-victimhood to be rooted in the manner Western people fundamentally define themselves by their triumphs against adversity. In the absence of real adversity, people seek and create surrogate adversity for themselves to triumph over. From this process they can rationalise themselves as having the inner-strength to overcome such barriers.
The first is the lofty intellectual ideal of solving a major problem, winning a Nobel, and getting your name in the history books. The second is the daily grind of reading other people's papers, providing peer review, writing grant proposals, and generally interfacing with other humans as a cog in a grand machine. The second is in some sense "easier" than the first. It's a lot more work, takes a lot more time, but it's a relatively straightforward (if often tedious) process that pretty much anyone can do with enough diligence. The first is a lot more fun, can often be done while showering, but is also fraught with risk and dependent on luck. You have to find just the right problem at just the right time under just the right circumstances. You can spend your time slogging, or you can spend your time buying intellectual lottery tickets and hope that lightning strikes, but you can't do both, at least not at at the same time.
The good news is that engaging in the daily slog is often (but not always) good preparation for and improves the odds of having lightning strike. So as a practical matter, that is often a good place to start. You might feel as if you're wasting your time reading everybody else's bullshit papers instead of writing the next Nobel prize winner yourself, but you're not. You're actually an essential part of the process even if you don't end up with the glory. And some day you just might be facing a really hard problem and go, "Wait a minute, this seems kinda like that thing I remember Dr. Arglebargle talking about three years ago, except that he missed this one detail..." and that's when the magic happens.