I can see that you have a long way to go, meaning that you will take a long
time to get used to the scientific thinking, and become a fully independent
investigator.
This is a long article and I will just comment on one point: You will need
to build your confidence! One of your problem seems to be that you do not
have sufficient confidence in proposing your hypothesis for your experiments
for the future, and in other word, you do not have vision! In my mind, your
mentor for your postdoc is a visional guy and you should really learn from
him/her.
Now you have your own lab and it is important to have a vision for short-
term, mid term and long term. You should be more confident on short term
plan because they are very real. In current funding climates, it is
impossible to have long term support. Nevertheless, you still need a long
term plan, which is the greatest thing you want to achieve. Then you break
down your goal to small pieces which fit into short and mid term plan, and
finally you try to get funding for each of them. It sounds simple but it
will take a while to get used to it. The problem is that it will take a long
time to prove you are right or long. Therefore, you will need to adjust
your plan all the time. However, I don't change my long term plan, never.
NIH grant is a great system, which allow you to change the plan all the time
. You can even change 25% of budget every year to do something completely
different. A trick to make your funding sustainable is that you are always
doing new experiments for next funding. When you have a grant, you are
already planning your next funding by getting new data. You need a vision to
take full advantage of the system!
Sorry for big rush and typos.
