TITLE: How can a mathematician handle the pressure to discover something new?
QUESTION [211 upvotes]: Suppose I'm an aspiring mathematician-to-be, who started doing research. Although this is really what I love doing, I found that one disturbing point is that there's always the pressure of discovering something new. When I'm doing mathematical research, there's always the fear in the back of my mind, that maybe, I don't get new results. In the past, I could think freely about mathematics, without the pressure, but now that it's "my job", I have these problems.
How to handle this? Since this site is for mathematicians from the graduate level onwards, maybe somebody has a good suggestion. Note that, although this is a mathematics forum, I think this question is appropriate here, since it perfectly matches with the description of the "soft question"-tag.

REPLY [15 votes]: There is a quotation I once heard that perhaps someone could provide a reference to. It may even have been an MO comment...
The gist of it was that as one gets along in one's mathematical career one's research often starts to feel less like tackling some impossible obstacle than preparing a meal for friends. 
As I understand this, we mathematicians find a corner of the subject where we want to resolve some problems that are not so flashy as to draw international attention and gain us a Fields Medal or a tenure-track job at Princeton, but are interesting and important for the area of mathematics we love and are aiding in the growth of. The former sort of goal may drive one's early career, the scratching, biting and clawing that seems necessary to secure the time to think with a decent academic job. Later on, post-tenure, one can try to focus a bit more (with equal or greater intensity) on figuring out what is actually going on with a bit of mathematics. Usually, this corner is interesting to a small community of mathematicians who really will care about the work. It really feels that research is a conversation with these people, and that the work is pursued in a spirit of mutual appreciation of the beauty of that subject and a shared, deep desire for increased clarity...although the realities of promotion and pay still drive the occasional flare up to attempt to become famous...
The fewer of these flare-ups, the better, I think. They are driven by economic forces, rather than honest mathematics. The greatest of us probably think of these sorts of economic forces the least, either because they developed their mathematics early enough to head off these forces early on and now have coveted jobs, or simply they are used to living a spartan lifestyle that shields them from typical economic concerns.
This answer, by the way, is a comment mainly intended for the OP, and may be too riddled with opinion to be appropriate. If down voted sufficiently, I will remove it.