You and Your Research

I’m exploring the idea of what it is to learn in public, what it is to design your own PhD, and what attitudes and mindsets you need in order to succeed at this. I was inspired by reading Richard Hamming’s speech “You and Your Research” today on the topic of doing great work and wanted to summarize and comment on a few of his points.

Drive:  “You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, `How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, `You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.' I simply slunk out of the office!”

Compounding interest is the key to drive. 10% more effort, day after day, produces enormous dividends . Moreover, this idea of drive contains within the push to know more, develop and keep digging deeper, day after day.

As a counter point, Hamming’s perspective on this point appears to be essentially “Work Harder.” By itself this idea falls flat, and reeks of capitalist bootstrapping.

Important Problems in your field: “f you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.”

Of Hamming’s points, this is the one that cuts deepest to me. I don’t ask enough if I am working on the most important questions in my field, or more importantly, if I’m working on the most important questions to me. I’m inspired to dig deeper here to define and understand what are my most important problems, or what the most important problems are in my community.

Open door, open mind: “Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, `The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.”

This is something I can also work on. I spend most of my time consuming information, not discussing and putting those thoughts and questions out into the world. I should be more readily engaged with discussions online and in person across a ton of topics. It also applies to the idea of learning in public and making the most out of the public interactions you’re having.

Selling: “The world is supposed to be waiting, and when you do something great, they should rush out and welcome it. But the fact is everyone is busy with their own work.”

I fundamentally agree with this. At the end of the day, you find fame and influence and expertise by presenting your information publically and selling it as a narrative. It’s critical to do this, whether your idea is good or bad. If you don’t sell, your idea will die on the vine.