There was no support for me to do international comparative work at Harvard. Rather than fight with each other, we would try to at the very least tolerate one another and preferably have a dynamic of interchange. They built the lab for me. It was coming to an atmosphere where there was excitement about ideas and where I could talk to administrators who actually had some investment in the program doing well, because Emory was trying to make a name for itself. You could say it's an arriviste mentality, but hey, it has its advantages.
Talent is something to be fostered rather than exploited.
I've just started doing sleep research. I developed an analytic framework and did a bunch of comparative ethnographies with colleagues. To complete that I need to go to the field and actually look at people sleeping, and then I'll do a book. On one level, sleep researchers love this. On another level, I don't have a track record in this, other than this one analytic paper that I put together.