My work consists of following the answer to this simple question:

“What do I want to learn next?”

Clearing, by Martha Postlewaite

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worth of rescue.

When a scholar publishes a paper, it is a letter sent to unknown recipients. If the job has been well done, then with luck it may be found and read, perhaps years later, by people who may take it into their lives and let it change their understanding of the world.

Roger B. Myerson, in “Learning Game Theory from John Harsanyi,” August 31, 2000

I may or may not have tried all this. And you?

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

-Theodore Roosevelt