How to do Great Work

Expert Insights on how to do Nobel Prize work

“If what you’re working on isn’t important and isn’t likely to lead to an important thing, why are you working on it?” -Richard Hamming

I’ve recently been thinking a lot about what it means to do great work. What does it mean to live a fulfilling career? How do you make the most of the short time we’ve been given on this earth? How do you make a dent?

I can’t say I’ve conclusively answered these questions, and I don’t think these questions can be definitively answered. I think the best we can do as human beings when it comes to fulfilment, is to try to find the right direction and carve our path instead of looking for a map.

I recently came across an insightful lecture by the eminent Dr. Richard Hamming on what it means to do Nobel Prize-level work and answer the question; “Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?''.

In other words, it means to do work on the level of Nobel Prize winners. The purpose of this essay is to share the insights I got while going through the lecture with the hope that it’ll point someone who’s looking for career fulfilment in the right direction.

Before we begin let’s see how Dr. Hamming came about his insights during his time at Los Alamos.

“Now, how did I come to do this study? At Los Alamos I was brought in to run the computing machines which other people had got going, so those scientists and physicists could get back to business. I saw I was a stooge. I saw that although physically I was the same, they were different. And to put the thing bluntly, I was envious. I wanted to know why they were so different from me. I saw Feynman up close. I saw Fermi and Teller. I saw Oppenheimer. I saw Hans Bethe: he was my boss. I saw quite a few very capable people. I became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who might have done.

“When I came to Bell Labs, I came into a very productive department. Bode was the department head at the time; Shannon was there, and there were other people. I continued examining the questions, ``Why?'' and ``What is the difference?'' I continued subsequently by reading biographies, autobiographies, asking people questions such as: ``How did you come to do this?'' I tried to find out what are the differences.”

Now, let’s see what Dr. Hamming discovered.

Without a vision of where you are and where you are going to be, you will not get very far.

Doing great work isn’t based solely on luck but repetition. For instance - Einstein. Note how many different things he did that were good. Was it all luck? Wasn't it a little too repetitive? Consider Shannon. He didn't do just information theory. Several years before, he did some other good things and some which are still locked up in the security of cryptography. He did many good things.

Curiosity is a requirement for great work. For example, Einstein, somewhere around 12 or 14, asked himself the question, ``What would a light wave look like if I went with the velocity of light to look at it?'' Now he knew that electromagnetic theory says you cannot have a stationary local maximum. But if he moved along with the velocity of light, he would see a local maximum. He could see a contradiction at the age of 12, 14, or somewhere around there, that everything was not right and that the velocity of light had something peculiar. Is it luck that he finally created special relativity? Early on, he had laid down some of the pieces by thinking of the fragments.

One of the characteristics of successful scientists is courage. 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. Courage is one of the things that Shannon had supremely. You have only to think of his major theorem. He wants to create a method of coding, but he doesn't know what to do so he makes a random code. Then he is stuck. And then he asks the impossible question, ``What would the average random code do?'' He then proves that the average code is arbitrarily good and that therefore there must be at least one good code. Who but a man of infinite courage could have dared to think those thoughts? That is the characteristic of great scientists; they have courage. They will go forward under incredible circumstances; they think and continue to think.

Drive is an important requirement for great work. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive.

``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten per cent 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. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with 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. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found I could get more work done.

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work. It's perfectly obvious. Great scientists have carefully thought through, several important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. Let me warn you, `important problem' must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don't work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. 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.

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.

`Selling' to a scientist is an awkward thing to do. It's very ugly; you shouldn't have to do it. The world is supposed to be waiting, and when you do something great, they should rush out and welcome it. But 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.'' I suggest that when you open a journal, as you turn the pages, you ask why you read some articles and not others. You had better write your report so when it is published in the Physical Review, or wherever else you want it, as the readers are turning the pages they won't just turn your pages but they will stop and read yours. If they don't stop and read it, you won't get credit.

John Tukey almost always dressed very casually. He would go into an important office and it would take a long time before the other fellow realized that this was a first-class man and he had better listen. For a long time, John has had to overcome this kind of hostility. It's a wasted effort! I didn't say you should conform; I said ``The appearance of conforming gets you a long way.'' If you choose 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.

End Note

The core purpose of this essay was to provide direction on what it meant to do great work by sharing insights from someone who has done great work as well as interacting with and studying those who have done great work.

It is also important to note that doing great work professionally doesn’t always co-relate to having a great life In fact, a closer study of some of the men who have done great work shows a neglected personal life, from Einstein, Tesla, Oppenheimer and the list goes on. This is also something I’ve come to learn - balance is required for a truly fulfilling life.

For anyone interested in crafting out their path to a wholesome life, after checking out Dr Hamming’s lecture, I suggest you begin by checking out Dr.

Alejandro Piad Morffis

essays on this topic ( 34 lessons I would share with my younger self & Only People Matter are pretty good places to begin)