You and Your Research

by Richard W. Hamming

28th Apr 2024•4 min read

All Key Points from talk by Richard Hamming ⏤ Bellcore, 7 March 1986

Luck favors the prepared mind.
You prepare yourself to succeed or not, as you choose, from moment to moment by the way you live your life.

Without such a goal you will tend to wander like a drunken sailor.
If you do not work on important problems, how can you expect to do important work ?
Yet direct observation and direct questioning of people show most scientists spend most of their time working on things they believe are not important and are not likely to lead to important things.
I began by asking what the important problems were in chemistry, then later what important problems they were working on, and finally one day said, “If what you are working on is not important and not likely to lead to important things, then why are you working on it ?” After that I was not welcome and had to shift to eating with the engineers!
Why are you not working on and thinking about the important problems in your area?

Confidence in yourself, then, is an essential property. Or, if you want to, you can call it “courage.” The courage to continue is essential, since great research often has long periods with no success and many discouragement.
What you consider to be good working conditions may not be good for you.

In a sense my boss was saying intellectual investment is like compound interest: the more you do, the more you learn how to do, so the more you can do.
I strongly recommend taking the time, on a regular basis, to ask the larger questions, and not stay immersed in the sea of detail where almost everyone stays almost all of the time.
You must be able to believe your organization and field of research is the best there is, but also that there is much room for improvement!
Do you want to be a reformer of the trivia of your old organization or a creator of the new organization? Pick your choice, but be clear which path you are going down.

To master the presentation of ideas, while books on the topic may be partly useful, I strongly suggest you adopt the habit of privately critiquing all presentations you attend and also asking the opinions of others. Try to find those parts which you think are effective and which also can be adapted to your style. And this includes the gentle art of telling jokes at times. Certainly, a good after-dinner speech requires three well-told jokes: one at the beginning, one in the middle to wake them up again, and the best one at the end so they will remember at least one thing you said!

I believe a life in which you do not try to extend yourself regularly is not worth living—but it is up to you to pick the goals you believe are worth striving for. As Socrates (469– 399 BC) said, The unexamined life is not worth living.
As I claimed at the start, the essence of the book is “style,” and there is no real content in the form of the topics like coding theory, filter theory, or simulation that were used for examples. I repeat: the content of these chapters is “style” of thinking, which I have tried to exhibit in many forms. It is your problem to pick out those parts you can adapt to your life as you plan it to be. A plan for the future, I believe, is essential for success, otherwise you will drift like the drunken sailor through life and accomplish much less than you could otherwise have done.

Go forth, then, and do great work!