#You and Your Research The speech *You and Your Research* is an inspirational and insightful piece of thought by Richard Hamming (1915-1998) in which he shares his perspectives on what it takes to become the great ~~scientist~~ person. It applies to research, but is equally important to life in general. He draws his conclusions from observing great scientists, people who made significant contributions. Throughout his career and life he studied successes of famous scientists trying to understand what, how and why they did things. He mentions drive, confidence, courage, hard work, commitment --- these are all important characteristics, alongside luck and how smart you are, but not sufficient conditions. You also need to learn how to apply them sensibly. He stresses importance of being aware of what is going on *outside your world*, as well as the role of effective communication, written, verbal and informal, so that you can gain the right attention to what you have done. There are also a few faults you should be aware of --- personality defects, ego assertion, or fighting the system. "If you learn how to work with the system, you can go as far as the system will support you". Learn how to convert your faults into assets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw The transcript of his speech is available [here](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html). It is slightly older version from 1986, and has a few additional bits not mentioned in the video. Few quotes I liked: *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."== *Hard work:* >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. *Creativity:* > 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. *Thinking differently:* >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. --- Follow-ups: Check Hamming's [The Art of Doing Science and Engineering](http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEngineering.pdf) book and video lecture series [Learning to Learn](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30), these are fantastic follow-ups to further expand on his thinking.