How Do You Find a Topic That You're Researching Matters?

"I struggled to show up on time to these calls because i'm too busy looking at the paper," she says. "My little boy doesn't give two flying it's about any any of these things but if he if he thinks he could get something interesting out of that or something will happen for him then he'll go in there and you'll look at it for hours much like myself so when you say it matters and it does and they don't care about it  i think that's kind of self-directed learning I guess is around making it matter"