I’ve been working on a really difficult technical problem for a few years, and I keep running into brick walls. It’s a physical tech project, so ultimately I’m fighting against thermodynamics (although I suppose we all are).
Each time, I usually step back and think for a bit, and then try to come up with a way around my roadblock, but it’s getting increasingly difficult, and I’m getting increasingly desperate (which I think doesn’t lend itself to proper application of the scientific method).
Each time I come up with a new possibility, I think “surely this will do it” and then it still won’t work. After all this time, I still feel stuck because I have no signal on my data. No matter how I change my process, I just see no meaningful result to optimize.
If it were “that didn’t work well” and “this worked a bit better”, the direction would be clear. Instead I get “that didn’t work” and “that didn’t work either”. It’s super frustrating, and disheartening. I realize that it might simply be impossible, but I don’t think it should be! Every expert I talk to about it is about the same place I am — “yes, that sounds like it might work”. No one has done it before, but the people who have done similar things don’t think it sounds impossible either.
I feel like the only way I’m going to get through this is to find a way to make more epiphanies happen faster. What do you do to encourage them? Do you take time off to think about other things and come back to it? Read a lot? Do lots of experiments and “do something every day” as many writers and artists recommend? In grad school, when I was in this kind of situation I would just shift and work more on art projects or go to the gym, but now that I’m running a company… there’s a lot more time pressure.