I've learnt the hard way that in research we need to be passionate about our research topics while putting emotional distance from specific ideas. Only about 10% of ideas actually work, so if you get too emotionally invested too early, you won't know when it's time to quit.
Often your peers will tell you your idea isn't good, or simply ignore it. 9/10 times they're right. Occasionally they're wrong, and need to be convinced with better evidence. How can you tell the difference? Only by being relatively dispassionate.
We've all heard inspiring stories of researchers who persisted for years or decades while the world laughed at them, and finally succeeded. I love such stories—perseverance is a great quality—but so is knowing when to quit. I often see misplaced perseverance in young researchers.
It's hard to tell an inspiring story about a researcher who took a cold, hard look at the data, saw the writing on the wall, submitted it to the Journal of Negative Results, wrote a two-page "lessons learned" memo to the group, and moved on quickly. And yet that's a vital skill.
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