"You asked too many questions."

I have been unhappy for the last two days. Usually I'll just say it's PMS but this time, I blame my hard thinking on an unsolvable research problem. I am unhappy with the assumpstions made by current literature but I cannot do better, at least not now. Besides, the data I use have important limitations and it cannot be improved because so do all the other available datasets -- only that the limitations themselves vary across datasets.

Yesterday, while I was driving home and sinking in my ocean of melancholy, I suddenly remembered my most respected professor and two comments he made back when I was living on the east Coast a couple years ago. He probably didn't know that both would be pertinent and helpful for my current situation. The first comment is, "Tremble, you'll have to learn how to deal with imperfect data in the policy world." He said this to me when I was complaining about I couldn't find a good dataset for my research questions. (Well, like I am today.) The other one is what he wrote in the margin of one of my class papers. He wrote, "You asked too many questions. Don't if you are not going to answer them.", just beside a big paragraph consisting of only questions. I wrote those questions down because they were important to me and to the paper. It didn't even come to my mind that they should not have been presented in such a way because that wouldn't help. But then I learned. Didn't it require some magic to suddenly recalling these old witty words? And it is aslo amazing that I still benefit from those comments today. They didn't totally drive my dissatisfaction of the status quo away, but they again reminded me problems are everywhere, but only a small fraction of them is worth internalizing.

Maybe, I will start from there?