You Don’t Need More Ideas. You Need a Better Question

What Michelangelo, a Nobel Laureate, and a PhD Meltdown Taught Me about Research Questions

There’s a quote often attributed to Michelangelo. It unverified, overused, and now a fixture in TED Talks and thought leader bios: “Every block of stone has a statue inside, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” It’s the kind of line you might find on a motivational coffee mug in a gift shop: cliché, a bit self-important…but honestly, not wrong.

As metaphors go, it works. At the beginning of a paper, a book, or a grant proposal, the problem rarely is a lack of ideas. If anything, it’s the opposite. Especially if, like me, you’ve ever sat in front of a blank page, trying to shape a coherent research question out of a chaotic blur of ideas, theories, data points, and instinctive hunches. My brain tends to move quickly, it likes to connect everything to everything, often all at once. That’s energizing, but believe me, also overwhelming. When everything feels potentially relevant, it’s hard to know where to start, let alone what to leave out. This post is about the value of a well-shaped research question, and what a Nobel Prize winner and a full-blown PhD meltdown taught me along the way.

“The Problem Is Knowing What You Want to Write.”

Decades ago, during my PhD (yes, I’m that old!), I sat in the UNC Chapel Hill food court, picking at a lifeless sandwich and venting to my committee member Marco Steenbergen. Marco (a fellow Dutch academic and a calm, razor-sharp professor of political psychology and methods) was the kind of person who made complexity sound easy and never seemed stressed. I, by contrast, was falling apart on the spot. “I just can’t write,” I told him. “I don’t know where to start.”

He took a sip of coffee and said, almost casually: “Writing a PhD is easy. You just need to know what you want to write.” A joke, sure, but also irritatingly true. Because the hardest part of research, especially early on, isn’t the writing, the theory, or the data. It’s the carving. It’s figuring out the shape of the idea. What matters. What’s noise. What’s just marble dressed up as insight. And until we know that, no amount of typing will save us.

The Anatomy of a Research Question

Let’s get practical. A good research question isn’t just a gap in the literature. It’s not about sounding important. It’s also not our topic turned into a question.

In my view, a strong research question does three things:

1. It’s answerable, not with one sentence, but in a bounded, testable way. That gives us the groundwork for building a research design around it.

2. It clarifies something we don’t yet understand. If we already know the answer and just want confirmation, it's not worth the effort.

3. It connects, not to everything, but to a larger puzzle others care about too.

Which brings us to Nobel Laureate Esther Duflo’s TED Talk.

Narrowing Down by Thinking Smart

In her TED talk Social Experiments to Fight Poverty, Duflo resists the urge to ask, “Does foreign aid work?” Instead, she reframes the premise: “Asking whether aid works is like asking, ‘Does medicine work?’” Her point: some medicine does, some doesn’t, it depends. The same is true for aid. Her call is not to shrink our ambition, but to sharpen our focus. One study she cites, by Jessica Cohen and Pascaline Dupas, asks a precise, practical question: Are people more likely to use insecticide-treated mosquito nets if they’re free, or if they cost a small fee? This reflects a real dilemma for aid organizations: Does charging promote use through investment, or simply exclude the poor?

The researchers ran a randomized controlled trial in Kenya to answer the question. The result: free nets led to higher uptake and use, while even a small fee decreased both. In other words, charging undermined the very goals of the program. Duflo’s broader point: stop debating aid in the abstract. Start asking questions that can be tested. Build insight brick by brick. Each answer won’t solve everything, but collectively, they form a sturdier wall of knowledge than sweeping claims.

From Bricks to Walls

The shift from asking “Does aid work?” to “What kind of aid works, for whom, under what conditions?” has reshaped the social sciences over the past 15 years. It marked a move toward greater precision: more focused questions, cleaner identification, answers you can test and replicate. But that refinement brought another question into focus: how do these micro-level findings scale?

Economists like Angus Deaton and Dani Rodrik have reflected on this. Their point is subtle but crucially important: even the most carefully carved answers can mislead if we assume they travel easily. What works in one setting might not work in another. A single insight can feel sturdy, like a well-cut brick. But stack it into something larger, and the structure might shift, crack, or crumble under its own weight. The integrity of the wall depends on more than just the strength of each individual brick.

The problem is bigger than external validity (can Kenya 2007 apply to Indonesia 2025?) alone, it’s also about mechanisms. Why did the finding hold? Under what conditions will it hold again? What is a finding without its context? Here is where theory returns. Carving fine-grained insights is crucial, but the wall can’t stand on its own. Systems matter. Institutions matter. Scaffolding matters: theory, structure, a willingness to hold complexity. Precision counts, but a fragment is not yet a form. Evidence needs architecture to scale.

This isn’t an argument against randomized control trails, survey experiments or other forms of causal inference designs. It’s a call for intellectual humility. Brick-by-brick accumulation is essential, but in itself insufficient. We need scaffolding: theory, structure, and an openness to complexity. Carve precisely. But a fragment, no matter how sharp, doesn’t make a structure. Evidence needs a larger structure, or it collapses under its own weight.

Ask Smaller to Think Bigger

That leaves us with a challenge: how do we distill all that thinking into something we can actually shape and write? This is where a well-crafted research question comes in. It adds a structure. This is where I often remind my students: if a research question feels too big, cut it in half. Then cut it again. Clarity lives in reduction. Here’s what that process of cutting might look like:

Instead of asking:

Does democracy still work?

Try: To what extent does affective polarization reduce voter support for democratic compromise?

Instead of asking:

Is the EU legitimate?

Try: To what extent do citizens see EU decisions as less legitimate when their national governments oppose them?

Instead of asking:

Does inequality cause instability?

Try: To what extent do perceptions of tax unfairness correlate with declining political trust among lower- and middle-income voters?

These reformulated questions aren’t small in significance. But they’re focused enough to study rigorously. And that’s the point.

Respecting the Marble

We reward big questions, on podcasts, panels, and keynotes. Scale signals ambition: Is liberalism in decline? Can globalization be reversed? These sound impressive, but without focus, they often collapse under their own weight. Most real research starts smaller. With a tension in the data. A footnote that doesn’t hold. A policy that looks good on paper, but fails in practice. It starts with something unclear, and tight enough to explore in a meaning way. Carving a question means resisting the urge to impress. It means trading scope for specificity, performance for precision.

This isn’t about avoiding complexity. It’s about confronting it with tools that work. The paradox is: when we ask less, we often learn more. Only when the marble is cut can the statue emerge.

A Rough Guide to Carving a Research Question

Here’s a quick-and-dirty heuristic for carving our marble into a research question:

1. Start with the itch. What doesn’t line up in the data, literature, or policy? Discomfort often points to insight.

2. Zoom in. Can we define a relationship between two phenomena, between two variables? If not, we need to keep refining. Sharpen the link to clarify the question.

3. Check the stakes. Who cares? What conversation does this join? A question without an audience rarely travels.

4. Run the fear test. Does it challenge what we thought we knew? If it feels risky, it’s probably worth asking.

5. Say it out loud. Can we explain it clearly to someone else over coffee? If not, it’s not ready. Keep carving.

And if we’re still staring at the marble? Then we take a walk. We walk it out. And then, back at our desks, we write the worst version of the question, just to get something, anything, down on the page. Then we start carving. Eventually, if we’re paying attention, something solid will begin to emerge. Just trust the process.

Let’s Keep Carving Together: Subscribe

If this post resonated with you, or if you're chipping away at your own block of marble, I’d love to stay in touch. Respect the Marble is a space for anyone thinking seriously about how we write, why it matters, and how finding our voice is a craft. Each post is paired with a Skillpower Session: practical notes on writing with clarity, structure, and care. Not to spam, just the occasional spark: honest reflections, useful tips, and the odd insight worth chiseling out.

I hope you'll subscribe, share your thoughts, or simply return. You can reply directly to any post or email me, I read every message. Writing is often solitary, but it doesn’t have to be isolating. Let’s keep this conversation going, together.