In the MIT AI Lab Emotional factors Research is hard. It is easy to burn out on it. An embarrassingly small fraction of students who start PhD programs in AI finish. AT MIT, almost all those who do not finish drop out voluntarily. This section tries to explain how that can happen and to give some heuristics that may help.
All research involves risk.
If your project can't fail, it's development, not research. What's hard is dealing with project failures. The few people in the field who seem to consistently succeed, turning out papers year after year, in fact fail as often as anyone else. You'll find that they often have several projects going at once, only a few of which pan out. The projects that do succeed have usually failed repeatedly, and many wrong approaches went into the final success.