I'm not a particularly experienced researcher (despite my title being "Senior" Research Scientist), but I've worked with some talented collaborators and spent a fair amount of time thinking about how to do research, so I thought I might write about how I go about it. My perspective is this: doing research is a skill that can be learned through practice, much like sports or music. The way I decompose research is into four skills: (1) idea conception and selection, (2) experiment design and execution, (3) writing the paper, and (4) maximizing impact. In other words, what differentiates good and bad researchers is these four skills. The first skill in research is coming up with or choosing a topic to work on.