You and Your Research

... by Dr Richard W. Hamming

One of the best speeches I've read in a while. It took me a week when I read it first to completely soak it in..

Sometimes I imagine Bell Labs, a place where so many great inventions happened! (B, C, C++, Unix, Transistors, CCD, etc) Can you imagine a place where people work on their researches.. where your colleagues get Noble Prizes for their work.. how it might feel like? Interacting with such a different set of experts.. everyone is doing something.. interacting with people like Shanon, Fermi, Oppenheimer, Turkey, etc..

Infact Hamming itself is a big name on it's own..

Highlights:

• Luck favors the prepared mind. A prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it.
• The particular thing you do is luck, but that you did something is not.
• When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow.
• Age is a factor everywhere, great research happens at a young age, while great artwork happens when people are old. So there's some age factor. But maybe because once you do good work, you find yourself in a lot of committees and then unable to do any more work.
• By turning the problem around a bit, I think the great scientists changed a defect to an asset. Ideal working conditions are very strange. The ones you want aren't always the best ones for you.
• Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity
• Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.
• Solid work, steadily applied, gets you surprisingly far. Drive, misapplied, doesn't get you anywhere. The misapplication of effort is a very serious matter. Just hard work is not enough - it must be applied sensibly.
• If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there's the answer.
• You can't always know exactly where to be, but you can keep active in places where something might happen. The average scientist does routine safe work almost all the time and so they doesn't produce much.
• I thought hard about where was my field going, where were the opportunities, and what were the important things to do. Let me go there so there is a chance I can do important things.
• It is a poor workman who blames his tools - the good man gets on with the job, given what he's got, and gets the best answer he can.
• It is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it. `The fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well (the research) that they will set aside what they are doing, look at what you've done, read it, and come back and say, ``Yes, that was good.''
• I didn't say you should conform; I said ``The appearance of conforming gets you a long way.''
• If you really want to be a first-class scientist you need to know yourself, your weaknesses, your strengths, and your bad faults, like my egotism. How can you convert a fault to an asset? You need to learn to use yourself.