I'll just post this quick note about resilience that the article talks about: often, the picture that we see is of a lonely scientist with long white hair thinking endlessly about a problem and the solution showing up after intense mental effort. While this might be true for some gifted individuals, for the rest of us mortals, perseverance comes more by just trying everyday to understand something, and trying different approaches and stuff. In short, not one burst of effort, but little attacks over a period of time, which slowly whittle away at the problem. The ability to maintain you enthusiasm through this process...that is what I personally think of as resilience. And a great way to maintain that enthusiasm is simply...to enjoy the process of attacking the problem as much as finding the solution :).
This is a great question, actually. And this is perhaps a completely anecdotal answer, apologies for that. But I've personally found that if I can't solve a problem in an hour, I'm just so frustrated that I stop, get up and do something else for a while. When doing the other activities, I'm still thinking of the problem, although obliquely. Often, new avenues of approach will present themselves via internal dialogue. This way, I'm thinking of the problem, even though I'm doing other "useful" stuff, and my value system is more comfortable with it, because I'm not "wasting" more time on the problem.
Like I said, this is completely anecdotal. But I read that Richard Hamming had the same thing to say about it, kind of,
Now again, emotional commitment is not enough. It is a necessary condition apparently. And I think I can tell you the reason why. Everybody who has studied creativity is driven finally to saying, ``creativity comes out of your subconscious.'' Somehow, suddenly, there it is. It just appears. Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you're aware your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there's the answer. For those who don't get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn't produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don't let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.
