In moving from topic to questions, from questions to a problem, and from a problem to the beginnings of a project—still an embryonic one—you’ve been building a research agenda and a plan. You’ve made your assumptions visible. You’ve identified the stakes involved in your research problem. You’ve also done reality checks, assessing if your project is right for you as a whole person, not just a brain in a box. And all the while, you haven’t just been plotting things out in your mind; you’ve been writing all along and are well on your way to developing your research project. You may well have finished the hardest part.
Your project matters to you. Does it matter to the world?
Answering that question is part of your next major challenge: getting over yourself.
You’ve worked hard at delving into yourself—getting to know the questions and problems that propel your work forward, and taking stock of your preconceptions, abilities, and constraints. But now you need to venture beyond yourself and to translate all of these questions and problems in ways that will allow others to understand them. If you do your work well, “your Problem” will become “their Problem,” too. Part 2 shares some techniques for doing so. If you follow them closely, other people will become as disturbed by your questions as you are—they will make your passion their passion.
You might well wonder: Why did I spend so much time delving into myself if I’m just going to have to “get over” myself? Now that I’ve finally found my calling, why would you ask me to abandon it?
The answer is, You’re not abandoning anything. “Getting over yourself” does not mean turning your back on all the insights you generated through introspection. Far from it. You’ll be continuing that introspective work, but now in relation to other people’s ideas too. Getting over yourself is a movement from a more narrow understanding of self to a more expansive one.
This process of exploration, discovery, and accretion is based on engagement. You learn new vocabularies and grammars. You also find common grammars, even when the vocabulary is different. Far from losing your sense of self, seeing your ideas in relation to others’ can help you to learn even more about yourself. After all, you can learn a second or third language without forgetting your mother tongue.
Another reason to get over yourself is entirely pragmatic: none of us, even when we do much of our work alone, inhabit a research community of one. Whether we realize it or not, when we launch a research project, we are joining multiple, ongoing conversations, some defined by a shared interest in a particular type of problem, others defined by the approach to solving the problem or by its intersection with a particular area of knowledge. In the creation of any new research, we rely on the ideas of predecessors and peers.
One of the most important conversations you’ll be joining is with the broader community of researchers who work on the same topic as you—a community commonly referred to as a “field.” Chris, for example, did a PhD in the field of literature—specifically, modern Chinese literature—and he later expanded his research and teaching into cinema studies. Tom’s field is history—the history of modern China and the history of technology. In chapter 5, we discuss ways to navigate your Field, and to rethink the concept of field itself. But this book would never have been written if we hadn’t ventured outside our respective fields.
The other conversation you’ll be joining—and this requires the bigger shift in thinking about how we do research—is with a community of researchers who work on the same problem as you. As it is the problem and not the topic that is at the center of the Self-Centered Research method, part 2 begins by introducing, in chapter 4, the concept of the Problem Collective.
The overarching goal for part 2 is to become aware of how other people’s agendas and questions intersect with our own, and to make the most of those relationships. Research is never a monologue, and your research identity is not static. You have to navigate your Field (and might change or add Fields), which involves interacting with different Problem Collectives. Doing so requires remaining mobile and open-minded. Yet the key to engaging with the ideas of others is to maintain your own sense of centeredness.
Part 2 moves your research journey into a broader and deeper engagement with other people’s ideas. You’ll be on the hunt for compelling, critical, and relevant thinkers. Once again, you’ll be stress-testing your ideas, assumptions, and theories, but this time you’ll be doing so using the ideas, assumptions, and theories of others. You will make other people’s ideas your own. Eventually, you’ll help other people make your ideas their own.
All of this requires being receptive to change. You’ll be engaged in a balancing act of seeking out best practices, common goals, new data and insights without losing confidence in the face of established authorities or letting others supplant your agenda with their own. You’ll be adopting a disposition that is self-confident and self-aware, but also open to and curious about what other people have to say. The process can be exhilarating.
Get ready to get over yourself.