Make a point of not engaging in the standard academic research performances, and figure out how to cure cancer anyway.
I hear this a lot, but it doesn’t seem to be very effective for people who do genuinely want to improve the world in tangible ways through academic research. The direction in fields like math and physics seems to be overwhelmingly in the direction of massive collaboration, and Symbols can be effective ways of organizing collective action on a hard problem. People joke about spending hundreds of dollars going to conferences just to spend the whole time falling asleep at talks and having coffee with strangers—but everyone also has a story about the great collaboration that came out of a random hallway conversation at a conference.
That being said, there are some high-profile researchers who choose to communicate outside of papers and conferences. Chris Olah’s blog and Grant Sanderson’s YouTube channel come to mind. However, these all seem to be people for whom changing the way academics communicate is part of their core mission. For someone who just wants to do genuinely impactful research, I don’t know if I can recommend “Fuck The Symbols.”
You mention paper ides, so I will answer assuming this is about research.
In my experience, picking a good research topic up front is extremely important, since actually testing your idea in depth will take a lot of time and there’s a significant chance that once you do that you’ll have to discard it anyway. So I think a period of flipping through project ideas without long-term commitment to any of them is pretty helpful for feeling out whether a given idea is worth the time and risk. Just make sure that you really seriously consider each idea you’re trying out rather than just dropping it for something else, and write down what you’re thinking in case you want to revisit the idea later.
During this trial period for an idea, I’d suggest biasing towards feeling out what the project might look like in the longer term rather than diving directly into implementation, though doing some initial prototyping can help you learn quickly here. Think about potential impact, feasibility given your time and resources, any unknowns you think could sink the project (investigate these ASAP), anyone you might want to collaborate with, and how it might fit into a broader research landscape. Talk the idea over with other people. Try to learn quickly here, and move on freely. Understand that if you commit to a project, there will likely be months of work before any payoff.
I have also heard the advice to keep multiple projects going simultaneously, although I haven’t tried this myself. I would caution against using this as an excuse to backburner a bunch of things rather than focusing down and killing what isn’t working, though.