... if you’re trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right. - Paul Graham

This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what's the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.

If you're in high school and you want to start a startup one day, you might think the best thing to do now is to start startups. But it probably isn't.

The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.