Suppose I'm an aspiring mathematician-to-be, who started doing research. Although this is really what I love doing, I found that one disturbing point is that there's always the pressure of discovering something new. When I'm doing mathematical research, there's always the fear in the back of my mind, that maybe, I don't get new results. In the past, I could think freely about mathematics, without the pressure, but now that it's "my job", I have these problems.


How to handle this? Since this site is for mathematicians from the graduate level onwards, maybe somebody has a good suggestion. Note that, although this is a mathematics forum, I think this question is appropriate here, since it perfectly matches with the description of the "soft question"-tag.



How can a mathematician handle the pressure to discover something new?
This is ancient history, and considering my age, I may have told this story here before. I started at Harvard graduate school in 1957, the same year that Hironaka arrived there to work with Zariski. He was already an accomplished mathematician, even if he didn’t yet have a PhD. Early that year, I must have said to him that I couldn’t imagine ever doing research, and he said, in essence, Oh, you learn about some subject, think about it in depth, and before you know it, you’re proving Theorems. I thought, This guy must be in Cloud Cuckoo Land, I’ll never do that. But of course, that’s exactly what happens.


