These lessons come from a talk that Richard Hamming gave at the end of his university course. He gave this talk hundreds of times and found that it generated a wonderful discussion.
In the discussion, participants agreed that although these lessons come from science, they were general lessons for success in life.
The Path to Fame: Do Significant Things
“Once famous, it is very easy to remain famous. Once not famous, it is very easy to remain not famous.”
-Richard Hamming
Before we dive into Richard’s wisdom, let me give my 20,000 mile high summary: If you want to live a life that matters, it is necessary to do something outstanding, otherwise it will all be taken away from you. This talk is not a talk about living a happy life, nor a helpful life. Richard himself says: “I am really trying to get you to think about doing significant things…”
Happy or Significant?
You can perfectly well decide that a happy, helpful, enjoy-the-little-things life is your preference. If so, these lessons must be taken with a pinch of salt. However, if you feel that doing significant things sounds like a good use of a life, these lessons are powerful.
Richard is old enough to be brutal in his comments and judgements. He tells participants in his course that his aim is: “…to stick a knife in your back and give it a good twist and make you say at the end: ‘If Hamming could do it, why couldn’t I?'”
The 14 Lessons for Success as a Scientist
Hamming’s 14 lessons for success (as a scientist, but I believe easily applicable to any profession) are:
- Work hard – the very able people work very hard all the time, they were at the problem all the time… “Einstein, Newton did not have incredibly high IQs… they worked hard”
- Accept 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.
- Work on important problems – If what you are working on is not important, and is not likely to lead to important things… why are you working on it? If you don’t work on important problems, you are not going to become important.
- Plant acorns to grow oaks – You have to plant small things, you have to work on small problems that can grow into important problems.
- When opportunity appears pursue it fully – 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.
- Keep your door open sometimes, closed sometimes – the guy with the door permanently open tends to work on slightly the wrong problems.
- Do your job in such a way that others can build on it – “Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem”
- Even scientists have to sell (learn to speak well) – “the fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well 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.'”
- Educate your bosses – It’s a hard job. You can learn to get what you want in spite of top management. You have to learn to sell your ideas. You have to learn to understand their priorities, politics and burning issues.
- How you dress matters – “The appearance of conforming gets you a long way”, “If you chose to assert your ego in any number of ways, ‘I am going to do it my way,’ you pay a small steady price throughout the whole of your professional career. And this, over a whole lifetime, adds up to an enormous amount of needless trouble.”
- Be good to secretaries – “By taking the trouble to tell jokes to the secretaries and being a little friendly, I got superb secretarial help.”
- Let others fight the system (you can do great work or fight the system, not both) – You must choose. If you fight the system, you will spend all your energy fighting the system. If you will learn to work with the system, you can go as far as the system will support you. Many people get drawn into petty struggles with the system.
- Always look for positive not negative – “by changing the way I looked at it, I converted what was apparently a defect to an asset.”
- Know yourself, your weaknesses, your self-delusions (we all have self-delusions) – “You can tell other people all the alibis you want. I don’t mind. But to yourself try to be honest.”
Here’s Richard Hamming himself on video
And I’d like to thank Paul Graham, the founder of Y-Combinator, who originally shared Richard Hamming’s work with me. The full text of Richard Hamming’s remarks is on his blog here.
Featured photo credit: Association for Computing Machinery via amturing.acm.org
