You and Your Research - Richard Hamming
Farnam Street - You and Your Research
each of you has but one life to lead, and it seems to me it is better to do significant things than to just get along through life to its end.
- It is worth trying to accomplish the goals you set yourself.
- It is worth setting yourself high goals.
Luck favors the prepared mind. — Pasteur
It both admits there is an element of luck and yet claims to a great extent it is up to you. You prepare yourself to succeed or not, as you choose, from moment to moment by the way you live your life.
Great people were generally active when they were young, though there are notable exceptions like Newton and Einstein.
Brains are nice to have, but many people who seem not to have great IQs have done great things.
Believe you can do important things. If you do not work on important problems, how can you expect to do important work?
Confidence in yourself, or courage, is an essential property. Look at your successes, and pay less attention to failures than you are usually advised to do in the expression. Learn from your mistakes. The courage to continue is essential, since great research often has long periods with no success and many discouragement.
The desire for excellence is an essential feature for doing great work. Without such a goal, you will tend to wander like a drunken sailor. The difference between having a vision and not having a vision is almost everything, and doing excellent work provides a goal which is steady in this world of constant change.
In most fields, age is an asset.
What you consider to be good working conditions may not be good for you! They will make you lazy and complacent. Discomfort will make you find better solutions through innovation and creativity.
You can easily observe that great people have a great deal of drive to do things. The more you do, the more you learn how to do, so the more you can do, etc.
The race, however, is not to the one who works the hardest! You need to work on the right problem at the right time and in the right way. It’s good to take the time regularly to ask the larger questions and see the bigger picture to see if you’re working in the right direction.
Great people can tolerate ambiguity; they can both believe and disbelieve at the same time. They can think a field is the best there is, but also there is much room for improvement.
Most great people have 10 to 20 problems they regard as basic and of great importance, and which they currently do not know how to solve. They keep them in their mind, hoping to get a clue as to how to solve them. When a clue appears, they generally drop other things and get to work immediately on the important problem. Therefore, they are first to solve these problems. The importance of the result is not only the measure of the importance of the problem, but also because there is a possible attack on it.
You should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it. Do not in the process try to make yourself indispensible; if you do, then you cannot be promoted. If you are to get recognition, then others must use your results, adopt, adapt, extend, and elaborate them, and in the process give you credit for it.
It is a poor workman who blames his tools. Do the best work you can given the circumstances, and after everything is over, see to it that things are better next time.
For “selling” new ideas, you must master three things:
- Giving formal presentations
- Producing written reports
- Mastering the art of informal presentations as they happen to occur.
Better ideas don’t automatically win. They have to be sold. Books can be helpful to learn these skills but privately critiqueing others’ presentations is very helpful. Use three well-told jokes in an after-dinner speech: one at the beginning, one in the middle to wake them up again, and the best one at the end so they will remember at least one thing you said!
You have to earn the freedom to work on what you want by building an excellent repurtation.
The unexamined life is not worth living — Socrates