 Overly dramatic composition for storytime. When I was a student, especially a grad student, I wondered a lot about whether or not I would have original ideas. I knew that asking questions was going to be key to my success. I saw people around me coming up with ideas and I always felt like I was behind the curve, that I didn't have a good knowledge of like like how would I ever get enough knowledge of the field, how would I ever read enough papers or write enough papers to ever become cutting-edge? How is it going to be an actual scientist if I if I kept coming up with unoriginal ideas? How is it gonna come up with original ideas? I worried about this a lot as a grad student so I came up with a method to start keeping track of my ideas and to tell how far off of the cutting-edge I was. I called this the curve of knowledge. I'll show you an example. So here's how the curve works. Time, some of human knowledge. At this point you're born and you basically don't know anything. This is the progress of all human knowledge, the cutting-edge. Okay, maybe this is on a long scale because I'm an astronomer. First you learn things really rapidly like speech and basic mathematics in the first few years. And then you go to school and you start learning about things like algebra and this time here, that's like a thousand years. And then you learn calculus and that's only hundreds of years old. Then maybe you're studying physics like me and you go to college and you start learning like E&M. And now we're like under a hundred years away. Maybe you go to grad school and we teach you that, okay, all that's broken and there's all these problems with it. But that's still maybe like 30 years old. And then somewhere in grad school you start having these ideas and your ideas start getting closer and closer to the point where your ideas that you start having are the things you start knowing about subjects, in my case, astronomy, start to only be one year old or or maybe less than a year old. When you reach this point, you've made it. You are doing cutting-edge work. You are at the forefront. When your ideas are less than one year old, this wasn't a strict system. I didn't literally make this graph every time I had an idea. But I did start keeping track of my ideas and I did start taking mental notes. So whenever I come up with an idea or a figure to make or some data to look at, I would take the hour to go look through the literature to see had it been done before. And if so, how recently had it been done before? As I got further on in my PhD, that started to get better. That time between when I had the idea and when it actually was published started shrinking. So that's it. That's my suggestion for how you keep track of where you are in your academic journey in terms of coming up with cutting-edge ideas. If you practice idea generation and creativity, your ideas will get better. And if you spend the time to go look at these ideas and see if they've been done, most of the time you'll find they have been done. Sometimes before you were even born. But that's okay. That process is how you learn and how you get up to date and how you figure out new ideas. You can't push the limits of human knowledge. You can't do cutting-edge work unless you know where that edge is. And you're only going to find that by throwing a lot of ideas out there. But constantly having inspiration or having creative moments and looking them up and seeing if they've been done. There you go.