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Three steps to make small idea pay off later on

When you have an imaginative idea in mind and wonder whether or not it is realistic, there is a strategy to make analogy with real life examples. For example, Uber bioinformatics, Airbnb Lab, publication assembly line, these provide you with a different view to think about the logic and feasibility behind that. Sometimes, it does not have to be very rational, although this is dangerous for academic research, the idea will grow like seed in heart until someday you came across other things, your idea might pay dividends then.

Many great ideas are stopped at thinking stage, making analogy is the first step to inspire creativity, the second step is to ask question, a good question is more important than resolving it. The last step also the most important is to start doing. As the saying goes “It is more important to set foot on the journey to west than to reach Lingshan.”

I know people want to be perfect and get everything ready to do the next, for a small idea, it does not have to wait and even you struck in middle. Don’t let a tough question hold you up. Skip it and move on, otherwise you'll end up with wasting of time. Also, that is good sign which means you are making progress. Every part of your mid-step work is valuable and will become treasure for others who might experiencing the similar challenging.

It is important to cherish and credit your milestone merit, this is critical to keep the ball of idea rolling with a suitable amount of people. For example, highly similar duplicate (HSD) is an idea when look into the green alga living in extreme environment in during pandemic. When I want to look into if this is the case for other species, I developed a tool HSDFinder to conveniently process others, however that is not easy to publish the tool as an article, because a real method paper, authors should use benchmark datasets, test a variety of public available methods, and evaluate the improvement as well as performance by stastics (e.g., P-value, t-test etc.). And I don’t have a whole amount of time to contribute this, so I lower my goal to put my mid-step work into protocol which is relatively straightforward to handle with piece of time each day where you don’t need to worries where the reference I have read, how to create the perfect illustrative imagine. I feel simplify the goal and expectation allow me to focus on the essence of the thing: to demonstrate users to how to efficiently proceed the tool. The whole process is extremely valuable which I build my confidence and learn a lot to use state of art tool to improve the tool, including this review “Users should be able to focus in their science, not in installing and managing software, so make it easy to them is fundamental.” Now, the small idea of HSD (2020) has become HSDFinder protocol (2021), HSDFinder tool (2021), HSDatabase (2022), HSD review (2022), HSDecipher (2023), HSDSnake (2024), and maybe HSDLearn (202?). This is an example for how an idea seed can grow into a tree, how the inspiration spark can become a wild fire.

Overall, if I got chance I would tell everybody surrounding me don’t overlook the benefit of documenting your idea into mid-step work, because you never know where it brings you to the next effort.

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