Research Rabbit Trails and Why This Blog Exists

Wow, I’ve literally spent all day customizing and preparing this blog. Why is WordPress so complicated? It’s probably why I went with a blogger account for my first blog, which you can check out here: http://sleepycriticimagination.blogspot.com/. My first blog was about stretching my creative muscles, but here at Sleepy Critic Ramblings, I’m all business. Kind of. There will be plenty of ramblings and humorous asides, but in all seriousness, this blog is about documenting the creative process of research.

Now creativity and research might sound like opposite ideas, but research is ultimately a creative process. Research starts with a question, and when we don’t know what to do we search for answers by doing, well research. In the process of learning we come up with new questions that need to be answered, which then leads to more research….you get the idea.

All this sounds pretty tedious, especially if you set out with a very specific question and expect to find a very specific answer. Unfortunately research doesn’t always happen that way. But that’s okay. You learned something new in the process.

But what if you have no idea what to do? You want to start a business but don’t know where to begin. Research. You don’t know what to write about for that paper in English class. Research. You’re buying a new car. Research.

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

Albert Einstein once said that. When I was researching that quote I found at least 2 sources that claimed Einstein never said that. I’ll look deeper into that later. But whether he said it or not, research is always a good place to start when we’re lost, and I think what Einstein (or whoever said it) meant was that research stops once we know what we’re doing.

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3 thoughts on “Research Rabbit Trails and Why This Blog Exists

  1. Pingback: Pokémon and Primary Sources: Researching Popular Culture – Sleepy Critic Ramblings

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