9th December, 2022 - 4:00AM
You and Your Research (How about a 7/10?)
What is in a Title?
I am participating in a Software Engineering mentorship program, and in it, my mentor gave us this video by Richard Hamming to watch and present our lessons learnt. Little did we know that marks were going to be awarded and we performed unacceptably woeful that he decided to go blunt on us, saying we did a bullshit job. We were 3 in number, First presenter got 1/10, I got 3/10 and the last guy got 0/10. He didn’t even watch the whole video, can you imagine?.
Coincidentally when all hell broke lose and my mentor was giving marks I guessed I would get 3/10 and that is what he gave me. He asked us to rewatch the video and present our lessons the next day, This is my lesson preparation article and I hope to get at least get 7/10 hence the title. I am putting in my best and hoping, I get that, anything below that is unacceptable.
You and Your Research is a speech given by Richard(Rich) Wesley Hamming in June 5, 1995. It is a culmination of his decades long direct observation of scientists at the Bell Labs where he worked. The talk is about how one can define their own success and research their way towards achieving it. One's own success(important work) is been likened to Nobel-Prize winning work to denote how important one's success should be viewed as.
Why is the talk important?
We have one finite life. If we only get one chance to do this life thing, why don’t we use it to do significant work?
Work that would benefit us and benefit society? In the talk Richard Hamming tries to convince us on why it is important that we do important great work and also motivate us with his story aiming at making us ask if he could do it, why can’t we achieve significant work on our own? And he lays down important direct observatory guidelines on how to achieve significant work should we decide to pursue.
Below are lessons that I learnt from watching the 44 minutes long video several times and How I plan to incorporate the lessons into my life to achieve success in the field of software engineering and several aspects of life that interest me.
1. The Mathew Effect
"Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them" - Mathew 13:12
If you have talents, the world gives you more but if you lack any talents more is taken from you. And this is true in science. If you do significant work in science you are rewarded. You get to access to events/places that you wouldn’t have gotten access were it not for your work and this access opens up opportunities for you to learn and connect with more important people and this ultimately leads you to doing more important work.
A way to use this Effect to your advantage is to identify skillsets that will improve your overall human capital resource. Skillsets that the world values, the skills will pave way for you in the sense that if you have skillsets that is valuable to the world, you can be rest assured that someone will need your service.
2. Fame is not Luck.
Luck favours the prepared mind. You have to prepare yourself before luck hits you. There are so many ways luck can hit you. You can look at Richard Feynman and Einstein they both did significant works before they won any Nobel-Prize. Doing great work is part Luck and Part preparation. And the way I understand it is you have to prepare yourself every single day, I say it as, I am going to wake up every single day and do the best work that I can do, and if I am able to do that, then I am done for the day, tomorrow I will wake up and continue, I might not get success today but months or years later I am going to wake up one day and realise that I did it. Luck alone won’t put you there, preparation alone will get you somewhere but not there, you need both luck and preparation (Consistent daily progress) to hit gold. If hardwork alone works General Magic should have made the iPhone not Apple. Luck + Preparedness = Great Success, or at least puts you on the right path to achieving it.
3. Hard work
Edison says, “Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.” Hamming mentioned how he asked his boss about John Tukey, “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.” Newton said, “If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results. Doing work is partly luck but luck alone doesn’t cut it. One must be prepared to handle such great work before luck hands in. The race is not for the swiftest The guy that works the hardest doesn’t win. It is the guy that works on the right problem, at the right time, the right way that wins.
“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. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this. The misapplication of effort is a very serious matter. Just hard work is not enough – it must be applied sensibly.
4. Harnessing the Power of Ambiguity
Ambiguity allows you to accept contractions to your believes. It allows you to doubt your believes. Great scientist believe their theory enough to get started doing work and they doubt it enough to notice errors in their believes. 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. 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.
5. “Creativity comes out of your subconscious.”
So it Is important to constantly think about your problem and focus on it only so that you subconscious has no choice than to work on providing you with answers even when you are asleep.
6. Do only important work - If it is not important dump it
If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work. It's perfectly obvious. Hamming talks about how he confronted a scientist working on chemistry research and how the only one that listened and made use of his questioning, became famous and important. He would go to the chemist table at lunch and ask them the following questions. “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?”
7. Great thoughts time - Friday evenings
Find a regular time to Stop and think about the important things. Try to understand the fundamentals and try to predict the fundamentals of the future. New learn things. Understand the bigger picture.
8. Identify Great work and contribute.
In search of identifying great work, lean on your guts, most people can be wrong on judging great work but If your guts says it is Pursue it.
9. Believe you can do great work - And have the courage to
High IQ. High IQ certainly helps but it is not everything. Some people like Newton and Einstein didn’t necessarily have high IQ by standard methods but they achieved great success.
If you don’t believe you can do great work, you can never do it. Believe let’s you approach the problem with a problem solvers mind. A problem solver's mind asks the question "How can I solve this" not "I can't solve this". When you ask can how can I solve this, your brain gets to work, formulating ideas on how to solve the problem.
10. Working behind closed doors won't get you far in the right direction
While this gets you very far, the downside is that most people that work with their doors closed hardly interact with people and they don’t get to know where the world is going so a higher percentage ends up working on the unimportant stuff.
You have to plant little acorns that grow to oak trees. It is important to work on important things but you can’t always work on important things, sometimes you need to work on the small things that will grow to become the important things. You have to not work on just anything but important little things.
11. Over confidence is disaster.
There Is a fine line between confidence and over confidence. If you don’t learn to understand and separate the difference you will end up clinging too long to a bad idea or dumping a good idea too soon.
Have a strong desire to do excellent work Get a vision - Your Vision should be to do excellent work
12. Good work conditions aren’t really Good.
Bad work conditions forces you to redefine your problems and it often leads to great ideas on how to solve the problem at hand. That is how the hamming methods were invented. You can change the conditions that you have to make success either by inverting the problem or changing the nature of the problem to identify the underlying real problem.
13. You should study your successes not study your failures.
I have always enjoyed studying success and failure stories but I enjoyed failure stories more because I saw that as a way to make sure that I don’t make such mistakes. Hence I strive to learn from the mistakes of others rather than to learn from experience. Learning from experience is costly. I have decided to study success stories more, studying more success stories will put me on the right path to achieving success faster. When I reach there, then I can decide to study some failure stories as failure cautionary tales to avoid finding myself in such predicaments. Studying success is a very good method of formulating your own style of achieving success.
Problems are not important if you don’t know how to attack them. You can hold a lot of problems in your head but only approach them If you find an attack. If you find an attack of a problem you discard the others and pursue the attack. Attack = how to go about solving a problem.
14. It ain’t what you do, it Is how you do it.
It is not your solution it is how you solve it. You have to find a way to explain your solution to others and that has to do with how to communicate.
15. Learn how to Communicate your ideas
First you solve the problem in a way that you can easily explain to people then you formulate how to explain your solution to others. The 3 forms of communication. Learning from a Speeches. 1. You don’t just listen to a talk, you listen to how it is delivered. 2. What talks are effective ? 3. Why were they effective ? 4. What aspects of the speaker can you adopt ?
16. Progress is not Change.
Without change you will not have progress. Big companies don’t like change, you can push your company to adopt changes.
17. Demonstrate you can do great work then you get great job
When you hire a plumber, you expect him to fix your pipes. You don’t give someone the chance to do something great when he has not already shown greatness. A researcher asked for time to do research and he was told that if he does the research, he will be given the break. You have to demonstrate you ability first then you have the freedom to do it.
19. The effort to be a great person.
Whatever been a great person means to you. When you do great work it feels amazing. In pursuit of feeling amazing, it is worth it been a great person.