internal force(nei gong) or external technic(zhao shu)?

I went to an Informs conference from Nov. 4 to Nov. 8. Everything goes well. Meeting and making friends is the most important thing for me since our department only has very few people sharing the same interests with me. I need to extend my network. Second thing is to present my work. It is ok since nobody left during my talk and I got two questions and handled well in my opinion.

But there is one fundamental question occuring several times during the conference. On one hand, we need to have good papers before we graduate. It means that I need to work hard on generating papers, which implies that I need to read a lot of literature. As Long told me that we need to accumulate several tricks which are used by different authors again and again in their papers but no one collect and publish those as a reference book. This is absolutely right. Even those great mathematicians has only a few tricks. On the other hand, I like to take as much courses as I can since I believe only when you have complete skill set, you can consider problems from different angles which gives you more insight. Also you can do something crossing the different fields.

In Chinese Wuxia novel, there are two kind of persons. One is working on internal force(nei gong) . It takes a long time to master. The other person is working on external technic(zhao shu). It is fast to learn but easy to hit the bottleneck. In the short run, the people working on zhao shu can easily beat the previous type of people since the stuff they learn is more practical. But in the long run, the previous people can outperform the people only having zhao shu since it has more power.

In this conference, when people start to talk about those 'famous' people's name, I feel a little bit embarrassing since I cannot recognize a lot of those 'big' names. I start to think whether I spend too much time in taking course other than reading related literature. For example, the next semester, I plan to take two courses and audit another two courses again. But I stick to finish those courses since I won't get any time to do so after I graduate. And only when you have enough nei gong, you can pick up those tricks quickly. I am not worried about my ability to come up ideas. Actually, during this Informs, I generate several new ideas. For now, I need to focus on developing those nei gong and try to work on only one or two ideas. After next semester, I would devote most of time into research but not now.