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 not the traveling. It is knowing when to stop exploring and start drawing the map.

Unlike work with clear, concrete goals, like hitting a benchmark, proving a theorem, some projects are inherently ambiguous. 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 get published? 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 that meaning will crystallize from movement.

Eventually, you realize the months and years you have spent in these woods. Your work accumulates around you: scattered fragments of ideas, meeting notes, endless prototypes, half-finished manuscripts. Though the work feels perpetually unfinished, perpetually becoming, you continue working on it without hesitation, because keep moviing is the only option that you never have to fear of regretting your choices.

Then one day, you finally reach a hilltop and glimpse a peak directly in your path. The joy of this moment should be substantial. It should vindicate all the weariness and tears of those long, uncertain years.

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?” And suddenly you are not celebrating but interrogating. To persuade ourselves not to take those final steps, we doubt: Is this truly the peak? Is this genuinely the end goal I sought, or have I been seduced by proximity into mistaking convenience for destiny? Is this the final piece of the map, or just another fragment in an infinite puzzle?

The doubt grows heavy. Heavier than failure ever felt. What if the whole map I published was wrong? What if somewhere back there, I took a wrong turn I can never undo? What if there is a better view just over that next ridge, and I will spend the rest of my career knowing I settled for less?

So you retreat. The woods that once seemed so dangerous have become familiar, almost comforting. You return to them with relief, forcing yourself not to look back at that “false” summit. Once more, you begin another round of prototypes, another draft, another spiral through the uncertain territory that has become both your prison and your refuge.

It turns out we fear success as much as we fear failure. We have been searching for so long that the endless hunt has become who we are. We have lived in uncertainty for so long that certainty feels wrong. We cannot release even a preliminary version of our work because to finish would mean the search has ended, the territory has been mapped, the journey is complete. Finishing means accepting that things end. But we are not sure we know what “finished” even means.

Perhaps, as The Art of Finishing describes, the real fear of success emerges from the fear of being seen; not just evaluated, but truly witnessed. And from being seen comes judgment, accountability, and the loss of infinite possibility. You can always imagine it being better, deeper, more significant in your mind. But the moment you release it, that protection vanishes. The work becomes fixed. Real. Open to the world’s interpretation. Success in academia means your work will be read, discussed, potentially contested. And that is terrifying in a way failure never is, because failure stays hidden—a paper never published, an idea never exposed.

Yet I would argue that even if we somehow transcended our fear of others’ voices, the paralysis would persist. Because we are in love with this project. We want it to be in its most exquisite possible form. We know that tomorrow we will understand the problem with greater clarity, and by the next deadline we will have accumulated more wisdom to articulate our insights with deeper precision. Paradoxically, the more we uncover, the more we see how much we do not know, and the more uncertain we become about the true shape of the destination.

The questions become corrosive. Is this truly a big-idea, or have I convinced myself of its significance to justify the time already spent? At what forgotten fork in the road could I have chosen differently and glimpsed the true destination? We get so caught up in all the possible paths we forget something simple: sometimes the map itself, rough and incomplete as it is, is the destination.

Sometimes the beginning is the answer to when we should begin.

Reframing Success

Perhaps success is not reaching the ultimate destination but the map at this stage of understanding. Success does not come from finding a destination but from every details we drew on the map. The map that marks all the extraordinary scenes we have encountered: the place where two theories suddenly connected, the moment when a prototype revealed an unexpected behavior, the conversation that shifted our entire framing.

There will be other maps. Some cartographer might chart a more efficient route or render the landscape with greater precision. But they would draw an entirely different map, because only you can mark where you fell and what you learned from falling, where you found solid ground and what that taught you, where the path turned in ways no one expected.

Your confusion was necessary. Your false starts taught you something no direct path could have. The process that led you here is unrepeatable, and that might make it valuable.

And because of these experiences, sometimes when you look at existing papers and think “they already solved my problem.” Yet you see it because you have been thinking about this problem deeply, from your unique vantage point. A researcher from another background, looking at the same papers, will see entirely different implications than someone from HCI. You have to trust that the process leading you to this synthesis is a contribution that can only be made by you.

Confidently Release the First Version

Sometimes science is like art in that there is no finality. Claude Monet painted his water lilies obsessively for the last thirty years of his life. There are more than 250 canvases capturing the same pond from different angles, in different light, at different seasons. Each painting could have been refined further, touched up in color and technique, endlessly perfected. But Monet released them anyway, not as perfect representations, but as records of particular moments of seeing. Even the imperfections, even what he might have considered mistakes, remain beautiful. They opened the space of impressionist painting, allowing Renoir, Degas, Morisot, and Pissarro to flourish within that field.

It is okay that the first release does not explain everything perfectly. It is okay to be honest about what it addresses and what remains unresolved. Because no matter how meticulously you polish that paper, one year later you will think: “How did I write that?” And that is not a failure of the past, but evidence of how much you’ve grown since that first release.

Only after you release your work can people genuinely engage with your thinking. Some will disagree thoughtfully. Some will build upon it. And suddenly, from this released position, you can see further than you ever could within the woods. The work that was trapped becomes part of something larger. You receive feedback you never could have generated alone. You discover you were mistaken about what truly mattered, and that discovery leads somewhere entirely new.

I genuinely hope the field, at least in HCI, can become more generous toward incomplete work. Can acknowledge that the effort required to make something honest enough to share is substantial, and the courage to release it is precious. These incomplete works are not failures awaiting correction. They are invitations.

So to us as researchers: release it confidently! Release it with honesty about what you comprehend and what you do not yet understand. Be proud to claim that as a success. Not the success of a finished artifact, but the success of something that moves forward. The success of adding your map to the collective atlas, however rough its edges.

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.