Research

“You and Your Research” - By Richard Hamming - https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

~50 minutes to read 14k words OR watch on Youtube

TLDR - Few snippets.

The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it.

when they were young they had independent thoughts and had the courage to pursue them.

One success brought him confidence and courage. One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can’t, almost surely you are not going to. They will go forward under incredible circumstances; they think and continue to think.

because people are often most productive when working conditions are bad. So ideal working conditions are very strange. The ones you want aren’t always the best ones for you.

Hamming, you think the machines can do practically everything. Why can’t you make them write programs?’’ What appeared at first to me as a defect forced me into automatic programming very early. What appears to be a fault, often, by a change of viewpoint, turns out to be one of the greatest assets you can have. But you are not likely to think that when you first look the thing and say, `“Gee, I’m never going to get enough programmers, so how can I ever do any great programming?”

You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.

 ”Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. 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 - it is very much like compound interest. I don’t want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. 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.

You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There’s no question about this.

solid work, steadily applied, gets you surprisingly far. The misapplication of effort is a very serious matter. Just hard work is not enough - it must be applied sensibly.

Ambiguity - If you believe too much you’ll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won’t get started. It requires a lovely balance.

Emotional Commitment - When you find apparent flaws you’ve got to be sensitive and keep track of those things, and keep an eye out for how they can be explained or how the theory can be changed to fit them. Those are often the great contributions. Great contributions are rarely done by adding another decimal place. It comes down to an emotional commitment. Most great scientists are completely committed to their problem. Those who don’t become committed seldom produce outstanding, first-class work.

Subconcious - And you’re aware your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. 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. For those who don’t get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn’t produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

Lunch - “What are the important problems of your field?” And after a week or so, “What important problems are you working on?” And after some more time I came in one day and said, “If what you are doing is not important, and if you don’t think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?”

They were unable to ask themselves, “What are the important problems in my field?”

If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work. If you want to do great work, you clearly must work on important problems, and you should have an idea. 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.

You should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed say, ``Yes, I’ve stood on so and so’s shoulders and I saw further.’’ By changing a problem slightly you can often do great work rather than merely good work.

it is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it. You have to learn to write clearly and well so that people will read it, you must learn to give reasonably formal talks, and you also must learn to give informal talks.

You’ve got to work on important problems.

But I am telling you how you can get what you want in spite of top management. You have to sell your ideas there also.

So evidently those who have done it, want to do it again. I have never dared to go out and ask those who didn’t do great work how they felt about the matter. It’s a biased sample, but I still think it is worth the struggle. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself.

Why do so many of the people who have great promise, fail? Good people, very talented people, almost always turn out good work.

good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system and take advantage of all the system has to offer. It has a lot, if you learn how to use it. It takes patience, but you can learn how to use the system pretty well, and you can learn how to get around it.

Drive & Commitment, Ego, Take the system with you (Which do you want to be? The person who changes the system or the person who does first-class science?), look at the positive side.

I have found that it paid to say, ``Oh yes, I’ll get the answer for you Tuesday,’’ not having any idea how to do it. By Sunday night I was really hard thinking on how I was going to deliver by Tuesday. I often put my pride on the line and sometimes I failed, but as I said, like a cornered rat I’m surprised how often I did a good job. I think you need to learn to use yourself. I think you need to know how to convert a situation from one view to another which would increase the chance of success.

`Well, I had the idea but I didn’t do it and so on and so on.’’ There are so many alibis. Why weren’t you first? Why didn’t you do it right? Don’t try an alibi. Don’t try and kid yourself. You can tell other people all the alibis you want. I don’t mind. But to yourself try to be honest.

You need to know yourself, your weaknesses, your strengths, and your bad faults.

How can you convert a situation where you haven’t got enough manpower to move into a direction when that’s exactly what you need to do? The successful scientist changed the viewpoint and what was a defect became an asset.

they don’t work on important problems, they don’t become emotionally involved, they don’t try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don’t. They keep saying that it is a matter of luck. I’ve told you how easy it is; furthermore I’ve told you how to reform.

Best, Umang