Author: Ryan Yen

I once wrote that research is like drawing a map after traveling through unfamiliar territory map-and-territory. At first, I thought the hard part was the journey itself: the strange detours, the dead ends, the swamps where you lose your footing. But I was wrong. The hard part is to know when to stop exploring and start drawing the map that others can follow.

Unlike work with clear, concrete goals, like hitting a benchmark, proving a theorem, some projects are inherently ill-defined. They bend and transform as they progress. For such work, no guideposts exist to mark the endpoint. No established criteria define what the destination should look like: Will it be a framework? An algorithm? A theory? A working library? We cannot know what form the contribution will take. Nor can we know what success will look like once we arrive. Will the work won best paper? Will it resonate with others? Will researchers from different fields find it useful, or will it sit unread? Will it shift how people think, or disappear into the archive? Just as a traveler cannot know whether they will discover a hidden lake in the forest or a mountain peak with a magnificent view, we cannot know. The only thing we can do is persist in exploring the terrain before us, solving each problem as it emerges, trusting the process.

Eventually, the years in the woods start to add up. Your work collects around you, fragments of ideas, meeting notes, prototypes, half-finished manuscripts. Though you still feel like it is unfinished, so you keep going because movement is less risky than a final call decision that might later feel premature.

Then one day, you reach a hilltop and see a peak in front of you. That should feel like relief. It should feel like proof that the long, uncertain stretch meant something.

But then comes the peculiar paralysis.

Your body refuses. Your legs will not carry you to the summit.

The first words you said are not “finally,” not “at last,” but “Is that it?” The feeling changes immediately. You stop celebrating and start cross-examining the view. Is this really the peak, or just the nearest point that looks impressive from where I stand? Did I come all this way for this exact place, or have I spent months teaching myself to want whatever was within reach?

The doubt grows heavy. Heavier than failure ever felt. What if the map is wrong? What if I took a turn years ago that shaped everything after it? What if there is a better view just over the next ridge, and I will spend the rest of my career knowing I stopped too soon?

So you made the most reasonable next step that we human would, you retreat.

The woods that once felt dangerous now feel familiar, even safe. You go back to them and tell yourself the summit can wait. Another round of prototypes, another draft, another pass through the same uncertain terrain. The place that traps you is also the place that excuses you.

It turns out we fear success as much as we fear failure. We have been searching so long that the search has become part of our identity. We have lived inside uncertainty for so long that certainty can feel suspicious. Releasing a preliminary version means admitting the search has reached a boundary, that the map is real enough to share. And in academia, it means the work will be read, discussed, and challenged.

Perhaps, as The Art of Finishing describes, fear of success is really fear of being seen. Once the work is seen, it can be judged, answered back to, misunderstood, improved, or dismissed. The private fantasy of endless possibility disappears. The work is fixed in public. That exposure can feel more frightening than failure, because failure can remain private, where a paper never submitted, an idea never tested.

Even if the fear of other people’s opinions disappeared, the paralysis would remain. Becaue we care about the project too much. We want one more revision, one more idea, one more chance to sharpen what we mean. Tomorrow might bring better language and a cleaner argument. The trouble is that every gain in clarity also reveals more of what we still do not understand.

The questions turn corrosive. Is this really a big-idea, or have I inflated it to justify the time already spent? Where did I diverge from a better route, if such a route exists? We get so absorbed in the possible paths that we miss something simpler, sometimes the map itself, rough and incomplete, is what the work has actually been building.

Sometimes the most honest conclusion is that the beginning itself was the answer.

Reframing Success

Perhaps success is the map we can draw with the understanding we have today. Success lives in the details we have already earned, the place where two theories connected, the moment a prototype behaved in a way we did not expect, the conversation that changed how we framed the problem. We are so used to think of success as a point of destination that we forget it can also be a record of the journey. The map is not just a tool for others to follow. It is also a way to understand how we got here, and what we learned along the way.

There will be other maps. Someone else might chart the terrain more efficiently or with cleaner lines. And that is okay, because it would still be a different map, because you and only you can mark where you stumbled, what held, what failed, and what those moments taught you.

Your confusion mattered. Your false starts taught you things no direct path could have. The process that brought you here cannot be replayed, and that is part of its value.

That is why it can still be useful to look at existing papers and think, “They already solved this.” You see that conclusion because you have spent so long with the problem from your own angle. Someone from another background will read the same work and notice different implications. The synthesis you arrive at is shaped by that path, and that path is part of the contribution.

Confidently Release the First Version

Sometimes science is like art in the sense that there is no final version. Claude Monet painted his water lilies obsessively for the last thirty years of his life. More than 250 canvases capture the same pond from different angles, in different light, across different seasons. Any one of them could have been revised again. Monet still let them stand as records of specific moments of seeing. The flaws matter too. They are part of what makes the paintings alive, and part of why impressionism opened a new space for Renoir, Degas, Morisot, and Pissarro.

It is fine if the first release leaves things unsaid. It is fine to be clear about what it handles and where the rough edges remain. A year later, you will probably read it and think, “How did I write this?” That reaction is evidence of growth, but you will not grow as much if you never release it.

Only after release can other people really engage with the thinking. Some will disagree in useful ways. Some will build on it. Once the work is out there, you can see beyond the woods you were stuck inside. The work joins something larger. You get feedback you could never have produced alone. You also learn where you were wrong, and that correction can open a path you could not have predicted.

I genuinely hope the field, at least in HCI, becomes more generous toward incomplete work. There is real effort in making something honest enough to share, and real courage in releasing it. Incomplete work is often treated as a problem to hide. More often, it is an invitation.

So to us as researchers: release it with confidence. Say plainly what you understand and what still puzzles you. Treat that honesty as part of the achievement. Success is a work that moves forward, a map added to the collective atlas with its rough edges intact.

The summit will still be there tomorrow. But so will the path ahead.

A disclaimer: I have not yet succeeded, nor shipped my first version. This is a pep talk for myself and for those who feel and struggle the same.