I always admire those people who have excellent ideas. At the same time, I also found that some successful people who succeed not because they have good ideas but because they just did it, did things that other people think not feasible or not possible or not worth it. They have only simple ideas but with real hard working. I always feel I am not that smart and it might be not a good choice to do research. Now I changed my mind: I only need an idea then use my whole life to do it!
My advisor Dr. Dubcovsky once told me that all his research is just using basic genetics but by doing it very well. It is simple but just needs time and efforts. For example, in positional cloning, he did much more crossings and plants more progenies than others. It seems a lot of time and a lot of work, but actually, finally, this saves much time. Dumb methods might be the best and fastest methods.
Recently a lot of successful research depends on simple but repetitive and tons of amounts of work, such as finding loss-of-function Fungus effectors using EMS mutations and assembling wheat genomes using the combinations of high-throughput sequencing methods. These jobs are simple but great, but I did not do it because it is not a smart way. Now I think I am just too smart to do anything great. I should learn how to do things other than just waiting for great ideas.