What is Research?

'History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction'

Failure isn't bad, ideas go wrong in order to progress, if you embrace failure you will step out of your comfort zone and improve. If you throw yourself into something you may fail, but you will then have more time to succeed instead of worrying about failure and not progressing.

'If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?'

Clever people ask questions, if you're worried about appearing stupid by not understanding and then not asking, then you will never understand. Smart people ask questions to learn and gain that knowledge. 

(Research) is the process of finding facts. These facts will lead to knowledge. It involves collecting information about a subject from a variety of sources including books, journals and the internet, or by carrying out experiments by talking to people.

'Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing'

Primary research: Developed and collected for a specific use.

Secondary research: Published or recorded data that has already been collected for a purpose.

Quantitative research: Facts, figures and measurements and converted into numerical data, statistical analysis, e.g. surveys. 

Qualitative research: Studying people of systems by interacting with and observing the subjects regularly, involved in data quality, events, people etc. without numerical data.