You & Your Research — Notes
A few months back, I came across a speech titled ‘You & Your Research’ that was so fascinating that I re-read it a couple of times. It was given by a scientist (Dr. Richard W. Hamming) to a group of scientists working at Bell Labs. I highlighted something in almost every sentence/paragraph of it. It was as if he were talking about me in many places — you will know why I say this in a while — definitely, not because I consider myself to be scientist-material at Bell.
This is a summary of the speech, primarily for my own consumption later, but I have ensured that it makes some sense even if you have not read the whole speech. With brief interludes, I have quoted him verbatim. Nonetheless, I sincerely hope you would go through the original once you read this summary.
Dr. Hamming defines true greatness as ‘when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier — when it’s spelled with a lower case letter’. (By the way, there is ‘hamming window’ too, so he has all rights to claim that!). Lower case letter or not, the talk is primarily about ‘doing first-class work and achieving something significant’. It is with the perspective of doing scientific research (given the audience there) but I believe it applies to all of us (so-called knowledge workers). It sets out to elaborate on ‘Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run? The difference between those who do and those who might have done’. Replace scientists there with “product managers”, “designers”, “engineers” and so on, and it will apply to you. (Yes — ‘who might have done’ — is what I referred to earlier as ‘talking about me’).
In a sense, this speech could be a good companion read to Paul Graham’s ‘How to do what you love’.
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Giving permission to oneself
“Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You’re not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you, and you do great things by chance. Well, that’s a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn’t you set out to do something significant? Luck favors the prepared mind. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. 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. You don’t have to tell other people, but shouldn’t you say to yourself — Yes, I would like to do something significant?”
What kind of problems to work on?
Dr. Hamming emphasizes that it is important to choose the problems you work on.
“It is important because, as far as I know, each of you has one life to live. Why shouldn’t you do significant things in this one life; however, you define significant?”
Most of all, you should believe it is important to work on it.
“What are the important problems of your field? What important problems are you working on? 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 working on it? If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work. It’s perfectly obvious. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important, and he also doesn’t believe that they will lead to important problems. The average scientist does routine safe work almost all the time, and so he (or she) doesn’t produce much. It’s that simple”.
How to find important problems?
Dr. Hamming has this concept of “Great Thoughts Time”. For years together, he spends his Friday afternoons on “great thoughts only” — he committed 10% of his time trying to understand the bigger problems in the field, i.e., what was and what was not important. He actually goes around asking everyone around (department wise) in the lunch table as ‘What important problem are you working on’, irritating them 😃
He says it is essential to have a list of important problems in one’s field: “Most great scientists know many important problems. They have something between 10 and 20 important problems for which they are looking for an attack. And when they see a new idea come up, one hears them say — Well, that bears on this problem. They drop all the other things and get after it. Their minds are prepared; they see the opportunity, and they go after it. Now, of course lots of times it doesn’t work out, but you don’t have to hit many of them to do some great science. It’s kind of easy”.
Once you find an important problem, it is essential to move to it as soon as you can — “I found in the early days I had believed this and yet had spent all week marching in that direction. It was kind of foolish. If I really believe the action is over there, why do I march in this direction? I, either, had to change my goal or change what I did. So, I changed something I did, and I marched in the direction I thought was important.” Finally, “When you do choose a path, for heaven’s sake, be aware of what you have done and the choice you have made. Don’t try to do both sides.”
Working Conditions
Dr. Hamming says there is nothing called “ideal working conditions”.
“The ones you want aren’t always the best ones for you. 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. Many times, like a cornered rat in a real trap, I was surprisingly capable. What most people think are the best working conditions, are not. People are often most productive when working conditions are bad.”
For people like me who do not like open offices, he has something to say — “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. 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.”
The next one might not be very popular in the current era of work-life balance being important, but he has some harsh truth to say — “If you want to be a great scientist, you’re going to have to put up with stress. You can lead a nice life; you can be a nice guy, or you can be a great scientist. The people who do great work with less ability but who are committed to it, get more done than those who have great skill and dabble in it, who work during the day and go home and do other things and come back and work the next day.”
Ambiguity
This one is a favorite of mine — Being able to keep conflicting thoughts in one’s mind and still continue. I think such thoughts have come from other people too, likely Charlie Munger. (Too much of Farnam Street consumption can do this to you).
“Another trait on the side which I want to talk about; that trait is ambiguity. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they also doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults, so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. 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. Darwin writes in his autobiography that he found it necessary to write down every piece of evidence which appeared to contradict his beliefs because otherwise they would disappear from his mind.”
Focus
“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. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There’s no question about this. 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. 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. Everybody who has studied creativity is driven finally to saying — creativity comes out of your subconscious”
This looks pretty obvious, but is actually very difficult to implement. Even if we get a few moments, we straight jump into looking at our email apps, social apps or news apps. It need not even be social media sucking your time. Even reading the most useful ‘personal development’ thing means that you are not starving the subconscious. I seriously struggle with this.
Need for Sales skills
“It is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it. There are three things you have to do in selling. (a) You have to learn to write clearly and well so that people will read it, (b) you must learn to give reasonably formal talks, and (c) you also must learn to give informal talks. You can get what you want despite top management. You have to sell your ideas there also. You should spend at least as much time in the polish and presentation as you did in the original research. Now, at least 50% of the time must go for the presentation.”
Ego & Fighting the system
“Often a scientist becomes angry, and this is no way to handle things. Amusement, yes, anger, no. Anger is misdirected. Do not fight the system. Learn to work with the system and take advantage of all the system has to offer. If you do what you can do single-handedly, you can go just that far and no farther than you can do single-handedly. If you learn to work with the system, you can go as far as the system will support you. It takes patience, but you can learn how to use the system pretty well, and you can learn how to get around. By realizing you have to use the system and studying how to get the system to do your work, you learn how to adapt the system to your desires. Or you can fight it steadily, as a small undeclared war, for the whole of your life. You are going to tell me that somebody has to change the system. I agree; somebody’s has to. Which do you want to be? The person who changes the system or the person who does first-class science?”
This reminded of me something I read in, (I think) “What they don’t teach you in HBS” (sure, I read such books too) where the author gets stuck in an airport due to some system error and actually is nice to the clerks there instead of fighting with them for their mistake. He says that the most powerful person on earth at that moment was that clerk, if he had to make it to the destination in time.
Dr. Hamming then discusses the need to conform to certain expectations from the society instead of ego getting in the way. He talks of a time when he was not respected at a photocopy place (or something like that) because of the way he dressed. “Was I going to assert my ego and dress the way I wanted to and have it steadily drain my effort from my professional life, or was I going to appear to conform better? You should dress according to the expectations of the audience spoken to. I know enough not to let my clothes, my appearance, my manners get in the way of what I care about.”
Advisors
“As advisors, you want to pick capable people. What you do not want is sound absorbers. What you want to do is get is — Yes, that reminds me of so-and-so, or, Have you thought about that or this?”
Reading & Doing
“If you read all the time what other people have done, you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do — get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you’ve thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one. So yes, you need to keep up. You need to keep up more to find out what the problems are, than to read to find the solutions. The reading is necessary to know what is going on and what is possible. But reading to get the solutions does not seem to be the way to do great research”.
Oh man, this is getting very, very personal now.
“There was a fellow at Bell Labs, a very, very, smart guy. He was always in the library; he read everything. If you wanted references, you went to him, and he gave you all kinds of references.” Apparently, he himself did not produce much! Have I been ‘this guy’ in most places I worked — leave the very, very smart part, I am talking about the “did not produce much” part? Sigh.
Just as he ends the talk — Go forth, then, and do great work!!
(Even as I was looking for a picture to add, I realized there is a video of this — not sure if it is the exact same speech or not, but looks very similar)
