Geoff Hinton delivers unconventional career advice for researchers: read some literature but not excessively, look for widespread mistakes, and trust your own intuitions (either they will lead to success or it doesn't matter). He also recommends replicating published papers because replication reveals the practical 'tricks' needed to make results work and naturally limits how many papers one attempts.
Read the literature, but don't read too much of it. So this is advice I got from my advisor, which is very unlike what most people say. Most people say you should spend several years reading the literature and then you should start working on your own ideas. And that may be true for some researchers, but for creative researchers, I think what you want to do is read a little bit of the literature and notice something that you think everybody is doing wrong. I'm contrarian in that sense. You look at it and it just doesn't feel right, and then figure out how to do it right. And then when people tell you that's no good, just keep at it. And I have a very good principle for helping people keep at it, which is either your intuitions are good or they're not. If your intuitions are good, you should follow them and you'll eventually be successful. If your intuitions are not good, it doesn't matter what you do. You might as well trust your intuitions. There's no point not trusting them. I usually advise people to not just read, but replicate published papers, and maybe that puts a natural limiter on how many you could do, because replicating results is pretty time consuming. Yes, it's true that when you try and replicate a published paper, you discover all the little tricks necessary to make it to work.
