Xu Cen teaches you how to collect research materials.

Collecting information is too important in research!

The English for learning this word is research, and you will notice that part of it is search, which means search. A person can't do research, probably because he can't look for it diligently.

Some people like to ask questions and expect answers, which is certainly not a bad thing, but it has nothing to do with the cultivation of your own research ability. When you start searching diligently, you actually start your research from the actual operation.

You may think that it is difficult to collect information now that the Internet is so developed. But I want to tell you that you may really not be able to collect information. A good ability to collect information should be able to master two things at the same time-

Let me tell you the first point to grasp in data collection, and collect enough data.

How to collect enough information?

Two standards. First look at your initiative, and second look at the breadth of information.

Positive performance allows you to achieve enough, while broad performance allows you to judge how much is enough.

What is initiative? It's simple. For example, you ask me, what are the skills of online information search? It's not that I don't know those search skills, but if you actively enter the keyword "search skills" in the search engine or "how to search" in English, you will get the same answer, and even get more and better answers.

Besides, you have begun to practice your research. Finding the answer by yourself will be more effective than telling you the answer directly. This is initiative.

What I want to point out to you is that the lack of research data collection is often due to the lack of initiative of the researchers themselves. Super initiative is a sufficient guarantee for data collection.

Let me give another example about research initiative. Think about it, generally speaking, is the scientific research ability of middle school students and undergraduates stronger, or the scientific research ability of graduate students stronger?

The answer is definitely a graduate student. You see, first of all, because they are called graduate students. As we all know, from primary school, junior high school and senior high school, including undergraduate courses, students' classes are full, but at the graduate stage, classes are suddenly much less. This course is much less, in fact, to ensure that students have enough time and space to take the initiative to do research.

When I was studying for a master's degree in England, I only had two days of classes seven days a week, and one day I only had half a day of classes, which means there were five and a half days seven days a week, so we had no classes and no one was in charge. But in fact, one and a half days of class every week is actually more relaxing, but it seems to be nothing. The remaining five and a half days, including the weekend, made me nervous as hell. Because in those five and a half days, I will go to the library to read many academic books according to the teacher's instructions.

Then, based on actively obtaining a large number of research materials, to what extent should this amount be enough?

The answer is the second criterion, which studies the breadth of data.

What is commonness? My specific description of it is that it jumps out of a single dimension and has a much stronger sense of goal.

For example, if a chef wants to cook a dish well, he may have to practice frying the same dish over and over again, because the chef is a learner. But a gourmet who is more inclined to researchers wants to taste a dish. He doesn't want to eat this dish repeatedly, or even just this one. What he needs is to consciously taste more dishes and even eat all the delicious food in the world. This is what I'm talking about, jumping out of a single dimension and having a sense of purpose.

Why should we emphasize more with goal consciousness? A gourmet suddenly became interested in car maintenance, which also jumped out of a single dimension, but his sense of purpose was also destroyed.

Well, to collect information, we should rely on initiative and extensiveness to do enough. But I want to tell you another standard that sounds contrary, that is, collecting information moderately.

This moderation and sufficiency are absolutely not contradictory. People's time and energy are limited. Only by collecting enough information can we exercise restraint, conduct research more pertinently and complete the research.

To achieve moderation, we must use the sense of purpose and outsider mentioned above. You should pay attention to this moderation is divided into three situations:

On the first point, I almost learned a lesson myself because I was too addicted to the text.

In order to do my own course well, with a sense of work and purpose, I went to listen to many lectures by other lecturers in this App. You know, I am a person with research ability, and I have done a good job in the initiative and extensiveness of data collection.

Moreover, I listened to Mr. Yan Bojun's "Western Art Class" in the "Get" App. During that time, Mr. Yan Bojun has been talking about the art of violin playing. As soon as I heard it, I liked it immediately. I thought I studied violin for eight years when I was a child. After listening to those beautiful violin music, I really bought a violin. It was too dangerous. I almost went astray. Fortunately, I bought a violin and just put it there first to continue my lessons.

You see, I'm almost lost in my research text.

The biggest harm of indulging in the study of texts is digression. This kind of thing happened not only to us, but also to Leonardo da Vinci. He originally wanted to engage in art, but his irresistible research instinct swept him and led him to something unrelated to art.

Freud had a book about Da Vinci's psychoanalysis, called Da Vinci's Childhood Memories. It is written in the book that in order to describe nature more accurately, Leonardo used the same theory to guide others and carefully studied the characteristics and laws of light, color, shadow and perspective ... Of course, this is no problem. But after that?

Initially, out of the need of painting, Leonardo da Vinci explored the proportion of animals, plants and human bodies. Finally, he even went to study the internal structure of the human body and the function of life, which can be said to be completely wrong in execution.

Through Freud's analysis of Leonardo da Vinci, we once again made clear the balance between sufficiency and moderation in the study. It is common to deviate from the original research direction in the process of research implementation. This is not necessarily a mistake. You can't say that researchers lack research spirit. However, if you find that your execution is poor when doing research, you can consider whether there is a similar situation.

People's learning should be "non-standard"

The second point of moderation is to pay attention to the behavior of fans when studying people. When collecting information, we should be objective and multi-angle.

We can often see research works about historical celebrities in bookstores, and sometimes people may be a group or an individual as the research object. Researchers should still take the speech and behavior of this person or this group of people, even his or her environment, their relatives and friends as the research text.

If the person we want to study is still alive, it is best to interview this person or this group of people and conduct a questionnaire survey to get a relatively objective research result. Generally speaking, what I'm talking about here, other people's comments, interviews and questionnaires, are a combination of texts, ensuring objective multi-perspectives.

You may not know it, but I have been studied myself. I have a charging content product building group, because more than a dozen content products have been built in the last three years, and the sales volume is remarkable. I help friends who also want to make content products.

When I was doing the content of this class, I asked everyone in the group what they were learning now. As a result, everyone replied with one voice that they studied Xu Cen. Yes, it is to study me. Some people say that they bought all my tutorials and columns, "learned" the lessons from them, bought my two albums, and my book on slide production, watched every live broadcast of me, and paid to enter all my groups.

I think they are doing the right thing. They have completely entered the research state and collected enough texts about Xu Cen, but I am still afraid that they will be unrestrained.

In order to avoid falling into the study of my fan behavior, they should not just watch what I do and listen to what I say. You should also jump out and look at other people's comments on me, compare me with people with similar characteristics, listen to the negative comments on me, and think about whether those comments are reasonable, so as to remain objective.

About moderation, my third suggestion is that you should be ruthless, and emotionalization is the natural enemy of research.

When learning art, it is particularly easy to get emotional. You might say that those artists are very emotional. If we can't feel their emotions, how can we study them? Performers are passionate and comfortable on the stage, and their emotions will be infected when watching their performances. Yes, they infected you, but did they infect you with enthusiasm? If you want to study how they infect you, you should jump out of emotion.

Let's look at how the academic school analyzes the art in teaching.

When you hear the melodious sound of the violin, what you feel is the emotion released by the player. But researchers will tell you that the expression of emotions depends entirely on the technique, and the expression of emotions in violin playing is largely based on the technique of kneading strings.

I can explain it a little bit, that is, rubbing the strings with the fingers, wrists and arms of the hand that presses the strings makes a trill similar to that when people sing. If the violinist is not allowed to knead the strings, his emotional expression will be greatly reduced.

However, the same is the kneading of strings, when and how to knead strings, the different amplitude of kneading strings and the different frequency of kneading strings, which further causes subtle differences in emotional expression. These are all effective studies on violin performance after restraining emotions.

If you have feelings about the information you get, your research conclusion will definitely be biased. Some excellent researchers are often described as heartless people, and I think ruthlessness is precisely the noble quality of doing scientific research.