The joy of the chase, the reality of slogging

Love this. First the glorious luster of the idea in finding the next big thing:

Google is famously creative at encouraging these breakthroughs; every year, it holds an internal demo fair called CSI — Crazy Search Ideas — in an attempt to spark offbeat but productive approaches.

And then the reality of improvement sets in:

But for the most part, the improvement process is a relentless slog, grinding through bad results to determine what isn’t working.

Progress, it seems, is so much about the grind. Idea-coming-up-with is glorious and absolutely fun to think about. But the making-things-better part is hard, grind it out work. It’s work.

(Indented remarks from Steven Levy’s look into Google’s algorithm)