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Claude Shannon: How a Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives
- sillysaurus3 9y agoOne thing that occurred to me is that if Einstein or Shannon hadn't discovered their respective theories, someone else would have. It probably wouldn't have taken very long, either. I'm not sure what to do with this information, but it seems true.
- mxschumacher 9y agoCould be, at the same time I would argue that those who had disproportional impact almost by definition thought very differently from others (defying convention is tough: imagine what is must feel like to question the multi century reign of Newton as a lowly patent clerk). Very few minds have done the work to come within reach of the conclusions that these guys have been able to draw. From there I suppose it ought to be possible to approximate the likelihood of a Eureka moment probabilistically. I'd be interested whether future scientific progress is so complex that it cannot be attributed to a single mind (some indicators are rising numbers of contributors for influential papers).
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI think this is precisely what 'sillysaurus3 is arguing against. Studying relativity a bit closer in its historical context shows that most relevant groundwork for the theory was already laid down by other scientists. Einstein might have been the first to connect those dots and publish, but I seriously doubt that he was magically smarter than all the other interested people. That is, if he didn't do it, someone else would, probably at most few years later.
- raattgift 9y agoHe wrote three groundbreaking papers in 1905; Special Relativity was just one of them. He continued writing groundbreaking papers for decades after that. Even his unsuccessful investigations produced interesting insights. Sure, "someone else" may have eventually written down much of the content of any one of these three papers, but probably not all three and not all in the same year. Notably, he could have won the Nobel prize for any of those important 1905 papers (and did so for the photoelectric effect, rather than Special Relativity). In the same year he also had more than twenty other papers published, several of which were intersting, and all of which are eclipsed by the famous one on relativity. In objectively quantifiable terms, the count, rate, and accuracy of his published papers over the years is simply exceptional. A bit more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823796
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoI was hoping someone would mention Newton. I think if we measure Genius by (time of discovery before that discovery would have happened without the individual), Newton would rank as the greatest Genius in human history.
- Graziano_M 9y agoMost apparent with Darwin's theory of natural selection: He had to rush to publish because someone else had stumbled upon the same thing while he was still analyzing his data and compiling it together.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoIs that true? That's very interesting. The common story is that he had to rush to publish it because he was worried about his health.
- cfmcdonald 9y agoYes, GP is correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace#Natural_selection_and_Darwin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace#Natural_.... Where is that story common, I've never heard it.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoFrom Darwin himself: https://archive.org/stream/originofspecies00darwuoft/originofspecies00darwuoft_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/originofspecies00darwuoft/origino... My work is now (1859) nearly finished; but as it will take me many more years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish this Abstract. I remembered this quote, yet failed to recall the very next sentence: I have more especially been induced to do this, as Mr. Wallace, who is now studying the natural history of the Malay archipelago, has arrived at almost exactly the same general conclusions that I have on the origin of species. Whoops. That's some impressive integrity!
- pkx166h 9y agoYes it is true. Alfred Russel Wallace was on the other side of the world doing his own independent work and looked to Darwin for advice about his own theories. ARW is a bit of an unsung hero with regard to what he contributed to this part of Biology (at least to those that are not deeply involved in Biology). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin#Publication_of_the_theory_of_natural_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin#Publication_of_...
- Grustaf 9y agoWhat makes you think so?
- sillysaurus3 9y agoThroughout history, many ideas have been discovered independently at the same time. Newton/Leibniz is the most famous example. There are so many people looking over so much of the idea landscape that this seems like the norm rather than the exception. And if it's the norm, that means for any given groundbreaking idea there are likely a few people within a few years of discovering it. It's impossible to know for sure, but it has interesting implications if it's true. For example, publishing first is more important than being correct in every detail.
- Grustaf 9y agoI meant specifically for Einstein and Shannon. I’m not so sure anyone was right on the heels of Einstein, and at least physics seems to be full of discoveries that nobody even anticipated.
- bjl 9y agoLorentz and Minkowski were developing special relativity at the same time as Einstein (albeit in a mathematical context). And Hilbert arguably produced general relativity prior to Einstein as well.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoThe same is true of most (all?) scientific discoveries. A good evidence for it the fact that most important breakthroughs were made independently, within the space of months or years, by two or more people/teams that didn't collaborate with each other. My takeaway is that science is very incremental, and discoveries depend on what the state of scientific knowledge is at any given time, and not on particular smart individuals. I also believe the same applies to social progress - e.g. if Martin Luther died as a child, someone else would start the Reformation; if Marx and Lenin decided to pursue art instead of economics/politics, someone else would invent communism anyway, etc.
- sushisource 9y agoSomeone mentioned this earlier - "The Innovators" by Walter Isaacson is pretty much this thesis exactly. Progress comes from building on previous work, usually collaboratively. Now, I think it's fair to say that there are "geniuses" and it's perhaps a little uncharitable to claim that we shouldn't look up to them at all - but there is certainly more than one dimension to progress.
- gabrielgoh 9y agoIts very tempting to believe that because most of math/science (e.g.) is incremental, that all math is incremental. Once in a long while I stumble onto something really new, a theorem or a proof which simply has no precedent. These things make you go "wow how did someone think of that?" - and it is the ability to do that which distinguishes a genius from a regular and competent mathematician. It's very easy to dismiss all ideas as being incremental, but I think there exist real, rare sparks of genius which leapfrog the field forward, and these sparks of genius only get deeper and more mysterious the more you think of it. My only reaction to these ideas is a certain sense of awe.
- mncharity 9y agoIncremental, or low cost/risk? A more general concept. Because sometimes what seems non-incremental, is just a change in economics. At a history of biology colloquium, a sociology of science person, was trying to fit a narrative of new perspectives unlocking previously unconsidered questions. And the pushback was, no, the dominant effect was the cost of various tools dropping by multiple orders of magnitude. Which changed previously intractably (and thus uninteresting) questions, into potentially fruitful ones (worth pursuing). One of the many problems with patents, is non-obviousness being incorrectly assumed time-invariant. Granting multi-decade monopolies for "you did it this year, that's cute - everyone else was waiting until next year, when it would be easy", which doesn't promote the progress of science and useful arts.
- eatkinson 9y agoIf Einstein or Shannon hadn't discovered their respective theories, they would have discovered something else. Not sure what that does for you, but it also seems true.
- pmarreck 9y ago> but it seems true. It's definitely true. Here's a proof (?): 1) The universe has a static (if high) and objective number of rational facts that can be stated about it. 2) Anyone can discover these facts via accident, intuition, trial-and-error, experimentation or direct observation. 3) We have a smallish but more or less constant percentage of people who are obsessed with discovering these various facts as their life's work and who are gradually teasing out these facts from the mountain of mystery that lies before us. 4) Therefore, if Shannon hadn't discovered some of these facts, eventually someone else would have.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago5) Where 'eventually' means months to years at most. Not sure about Shannon, but to the extent I'm familiar with discoveries in physics, they're usually pretty incremental - at some point the state of the field becomes ripe for a breakthrough, and the first person to connect the dots is the one that gets credited as genius, even though their direct contribution is pretty small.
- pmarreck 9y agoEveryone stands on the shoulders of giants, where that giant is composed of everyone who stood on the shoulders of the previous giants, ad recursionum
- jacksnipe 9y agoI would contest step 1. If we assume that rational means "true", then it is clearly false: If statements A and B are true, then the statement "A and B" is true. In fact, if the statement A is true, then "A and A" is true, so if there is at least one true statement, there are infinitely many. If by "rational" you mean "true and meaningful", well, then we have to define meaningful. The strongest definition of meaningful that I can muster is "contains information that cannot be logically deduced from previously known rational statements". But then by Godel incompleteness (assuming that we accept arithmetic as rational), there will always be a (true) statement we can make that is independent of our previous statements. So while I think the discovery was more or less inevitable, there's certainly a flaw in your proof!
- joe_the_user 9y agoThe thing about Einstein, at least, is that he formulated a precise, compact framework that expressed a variety of results that had arrived already in his time. Without Einstein (and maybe Shannon and other geniuses), all of the results might still be here but might be summarized in a much more difficult and confusing fashion. Perhaps someone later would discover the compact formulation but quite possibly would not be able get it accepted due to the more verbose and confusing formulations already being established. Maybe not exactly equivalent but some claim that using a constant tau, equal to 2 times pi, would simplify a lot of math - of course good luck changing that now. See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/let-s-use-tau-it-s-easier-than-pi/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/let-s-use-tau-it-...
- raattgift 9y ago> Einstein ... formulated a precise, compact framework that expressed a variety of results that had arrived already in his time Einstein had an especially productive 1905, publishing three groundbreaking papers among others [1]. His paper on Special Relativity certainly consolidated the work of Poincaré, Lorentz, Minkowski and others, much as you say. His paper on the photoelectric effect, while building on Planck's work, outright contradicted the earlier work of Maxwell and was a crucial contribution to quantum mechanics. His paper on Brownian motion, on the other hand, built on very little earlier work and provided the first work offering a method to count molecules; moreover, the paper was the foundation for Perrin's demonstration of the physicality of Dalton's atomic theory. Each of these three papers had enormous immediate impact, and we still use much of the mathematical forms he introduced in each. Einstein did not stop with these 1905 papers. > be summarized in a much more difficult and confusing fashion Einstein certainly proposed a number of write-downs that were neither easy nor unconfusing. General Relativity (GR) is perhaps a good example of one of those in a theory that has proven to be highly successful. Solving the field equations of GR requires solving a system of ten nonlinear partial differential equations (which in itself would exceptionally difficult even before confronting the explosion into the thousands of elliptical, hyperbolic and undefined terms in the PDEs' couplings in general coordinates). Indeed, we're still confused about how one can decide whether a given solution to the field equations is unphysical and derivative questions like whether a physically plausible solution to the field equations can always be studied using the initial value formulation or something similar. The mathematical structure of GR is complete and self-consistent, and the notation Einstein developed was extremely concise, but it would be wrong to think that the tersest notation (omitting indices and constant factors) G = T makes GR only as complex as tersest notation (omitting constant factors and in coordinates in which momentum vanishes[2]) E = m of Special Relativity. --- [1] In 1905 he published more than twenty other papers too, several of which are only "lesser" in that they do not figure in the minds of non-specialists. [2] People tend to underestimate the complexity of Special Relativity; with suitable choices of coordinates one can use it extremely liberally in flat spacetime, including where acceleration is non-negligible (i.e., where there is obviously non-uniform motion in the systems under study). It's only the presence of real gravity that wrecks the globality of Special Relativity; but even where there is real gravity -- which is never exactly uniform or linear -- Special Relativity is still valid locally).
- ihaveahadron 9y agoNo if it wasn't for Einstein physics would never be discovered except for what was discovered before Einstein. Einstein physics only even exist because that guy did. Until then Einstein physics weren't even happening. MOROMS For someone to say what you did proves, someone actually, thought that was TrUE. Fucking wow u paint huffing faggots
- gwern 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
- Lordarminius 9y agoif Einstein or Shannon hadn't discovered their respective theories, someone else would have Maybe It probably wouldn't have taken very long, either. It actually could take decades, centuries, millenia. Think of all the discoveries lost to antiquity that had to be rediscovered. Think of Eulers findings that would take decades for some othe mathematician to figure out afresh
- amelius 9y agoWell, Fermat's last theorem is one such example. How long did it take to rediscover a proof?
- joe_the_user 9y agoI believe the consensus among mathematicians is that Fermat either didn't have a proof or had an incorrect proof. Any statement of the modern proof would require hundreds of pages and results not available to Fermat. So it's likely Wiles didn't rediscover the proof but simply discovered it.
- bitwize 9y agoIt steam engines when it's steam engine time, and I guess it theory-of-relativities when it's theory-of-relativity time. It's still pretty remarkable that Einstein/Shannon were the ones to discover their respective theories though. Can you imagine what it must have been like for them? I've always envied genius. Genius always know exactly what it's supposed to do and just does. Recently I'm wondering whether I'm truly cut out for my chosen field (programming).
- GoToRO 9y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcioLRXUCac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcioLRXUCac
- zzzeek 9y ago> "Letters he didn’t want to respond to went into a bin labeled “Letters I’ve Procrastinated On For Too Long.” ... Inbox zero, be damned." moving things to folders is... the definition of "inbox zero"?
- wccrawford 9y agoIf you have no intention of actually doing anything about them, then yes.
- ruraljuror 9y agoMy thought exactly. The authors seem to have gotten it completely backwards.
- asdfologist 9y agoI'm surprised this story made the HN front page. There have been countless threads where HNers declare that there's no such thing as a genius and that anyone can do anything with targeted practice.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kartan 9y ago> There have been countless threads where HNers declare that there's no such thing as a genius and that anyone can do anything with targeted practice. That's not my experience. What I have read is that in most cases people rates as "genius" just the visible face of a project and forgets about all the rest of the people that are as good, or better, just because they are not so visible. Also, there is no genius without a lot of practice and study. And that has a lot to do with motivation. A well-balanced team can outperform a "genius" as the complexity and size of the task grow. And that again requires practice and will to do the job. So it is more about not allowing people to be "prima donna" and value everyone work.
- warcher 9y agoThere's a pretty significant cult of the hero founder in businessy type writing. It makes for a good and almost entirely true story. But good stories always leave out at least as many things as they put in.
- JoeDaDude 9y agoArthur Lewbell, who knew Shannon personally, wrote a eulogy for him [1] and included photos of his "gadgeteers paradise" toy room[2][3] which is mentioned in the article. I collected photos of the gadgets he built to play games (now in the MIT Museum) and put them on this list in boargamegeek[4]. [1] https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/Shannon.html https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/Shannon.html [2] https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/toys1.jpg https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/toys1.jpg [3] https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/toys2.jpg https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/toys2.jpg [4] https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/143233/claude-shannon-man-games-and-machines https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/143233/claude-shannon-man...
- stevenj 9y agoInterestingly, I just listened to a decent podcast with Ed Thorp (an interesting man in his own right) who briefly talked about his work with Shannon. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2017-07-14/ed-thorp-the-man-who-beat-the-dealer-and-the-market https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2017-07-14/ed-thorp-the...
- gboudrias 9y agoAs a psychology enthusiast (and soon to be student), I'm quite annoyed with our fascination with "geniuses". It seems obvious that people who are very famous in their field became "very intelligent" because of a combination of hard work and genetics. But it's as if these books capitalize on the faint hope of being a repressed genius of some sort. I highly doubt Einstein or Shannon (as the article implies) ever saw themselves as more than passionate. And the ego required to want to find your inner genius goes contrary to the enormous humility they seemed to display. That aside, these books and articles all make the same mistake of studying a single person after the fact. It's similar to mimicking Steve Jobs: That's not how he became Steve Jobs. We literally cannot know how much luck was involved in his (or Einstein's) success. Might as well study the lives of lottery winners. So if not that, how can we maximize our potential and generally better ourselves intellectually? Simply by referring to the very vast fields of learning, motivation and general cognitive science. But "learn the science" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "how to be Einstein", now does it?
- pmarreck 9y agoDisclaimer: Was a Psych student. Now a programmer. :) I have to agree that the word "genius" is just too loaded and misleading. There are many ways an individual can excel and many ways they fail to; most people are a mixed bag. Shannon was gifted with a powerful curiosity and love of discovery, something not shared by all (and I'm not making a value judgment here at all; simply stating a fact). He never chose to have those motivations, so he should not be overly credited with the consequence of having them.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoI highly doubt Einstein or Shannon (as the article implies) ever saw themselves as more than passionate. They may have kept it to themselves, but they were certainly aware of their status. Who are we to say what the author should or shouldn't study? Why is studying a genius a bad thing? (And they are geniuses, if it's possible to compare one person to another at all.) You've made some good points about how someone becomes a genius: it's mostly luck, especially in genetics and upbringing. But there's no reason that studying this is inherently useless.
- booleandilemma 9y agoI've seen 3 Claude Shannon articles on HN in the past 2 weeks. What's the occasion?
- hvass 9y agoThere's a new biography on him, A Mind at Play https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Play-Shannon-Invented-Information/dp/1476766681/ https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Play-Shannon-Invented-Informatio...
- Graziano_M 9y agoYou lost me at "10'000 hours".
- atsaloli 9y agoVint Cerf's article on Claude Shannon: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v547/n7662/full/547159a.html?foxtrotcallback=true http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v547/n7662/full/547159a...
- petraeus 9y agoI bet there would be many more geniuses with ubi
- s73ver 9y agoQuite possibly. From what it sounds like, Shannon's job with Bell Labs was kinda his form of UBI. They didn't really make him "work"; they just kinda gave him money, and told him to do what he felt like. That lead to a bunch of impressive things, given the resources he had access to. Granted, a lot of that came after some of his groundbreaking work on information theory, which is what earned him his fame.
- omot 9y agoIf there were many more geniuses wouldn't all them considered normal? Geniuses are only geniuses because they have been perceived to operate several standard deviation above the average level of achievements. It's too bad that humans usually value themselves in relative to people near them. Like top students at bottom ranked schools probably feel really proud and happy on a day to day basis, but bottom students from top schools are often depressed and occasionally commit suicide. Even the top student at bottom schools feel depressed that they couldn't get into a better school out of college, when in reality most people in the world didn't have opportunities to go to college.
- petraeus 9y agoI bet there would be many more geniuses with ubi
- madaxe_again 9y agoI went to school with his grandson - incredibly, ridiculously, intelligent guy, who was the only person three years ahead at the school - I and one other were two ahead, and a dozen or so were a year ahead. That said, I always felt for the chap, as socially inept didn't begin to cover it (as someone who graduated school two years early I can say with surety that it wasn't solely the temporal displacement that fettered his sociality - it was definitely a factor for us all, but he couldn't/wouldn't communicate even with other maths geeks), and I could only see him pursuing a career in academia - which he is. I also felt for him as as a mathematically brilliant Shannon expectations couldn't have been higher - I was going to cap this off by saying I'm sure he'll do great things, but instead, I'll say I hope he has a happy life.
- omot 9y agoWow... what school is this, where everyone is years ahead?
- madaxe_again 9y agoKing's Canterbury. Out of 700 pupils, there were about 20 one or more years ahead - I was skipped a few years when I was six, at a previous school, so just continued from there - similar for him, I believe. No idea how it is there now, I left 15 years ago. I had the advantage of having always been tall for my age, so mostly hid the fact that I was young - Alex, however, was a fairly small chap and I think suffered for it. Fond memories of celebrating my 18th at university, and the college bar being like "lol what, we've been serving you for a year".
- mathperson 9y agoHonestly it is hard for me to regard as very credible an author who openly admits not knowing who shannon was before starting this book..
- devopsproject 9y agoWe all start from zero. If a person can't be knowledgeable after a bit of rigor, then no one can be trusted in any subject and we can see how everything will become "fake news" and "alterntative facts"
- mathperson 9y agoI suppose. Another part of this I try to read science writers who have a bit of a stem background, like the very good http://www.ericaklarreich.com/ http://www.ericaklarreich.com/ I find people with no stem background, even when they mean very well and work hard, just miss a lot when doing writing of this sort. They simply do not and in a real sense cannot understand the process of creating new scientific knowledge. Their impressions are merely metaphorical and not direct. Having the words 'genius' in the title...ugh. I suppose I am maybe not the target audience for this though.
- s73ver 9y agoI read The Idea Factory, about Bell Labs, and they had a few sections on Shannon. Honestly, from what I read, it sounds like the guy didn't want to work, or have a job. And the Fates were kind, and dropped him into a situation where not only was he able to make that a reality, but he was able to provide several meaningful contributions to the fields of programming and information theory while doing so. He was able to not have to "work", and get to be part of some pretty amazing stuff.
- zild3d 9y ago>he was able to provide several meaningful contributions Don't you think that's severely downplaying his role? He invented the field of information theory, not just made several contributions. He founded digital circuit design. The entire concept of being able to use electrical circuits to implement boolean logic, and proving you can use those circuits to solve any problem that boolean logic can. He also came up with sampling theory, bringing communications into the digital world (as well as signal processing). And then sure, he made several (extremely important) contributions to the field of cryptography > get to be part of some pretty amazing stuff. He WAS a lot of that pretty amazing stuff.
- s73ver 9y agoMaybe I did downplay a bit. But the key takeway was, he was involved with all of that, not because he was assigned to it, but because it was interesting to him, and he wanted to do something with it. His work with digital circuit design arose out of him playing with making maze solving robots. He, of all people, clearly embodied the idea of, "Get a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life." Of course, it doesn't help that he had an extremely tolerant employer, one who realized that letting him do things like play with the robots, would lead to such breakthroughs.
- roceasta 9y ago>But if his tendency to follow his curiosity wherever it led sometimes rendered him less productive, he also had the patience to keep coming back to his best ideas, over the course of years. [snip] >“He never argued his ideas. If people didn’t believe in them, he ignored those people.” I think there's a connection here which reveals a common misconception about intellectual creation, namely that scientific theories are born in a legalistic fashion by criticism, argument and debate. In reality the role of criticism is to defend against ideas we don't like. Ideas we do like are shielded from explicit criticism, for instance by ignoring critics, and allowed to grow in our brains over time. It's a pleasure to return to such ideas again and again, while they remain interesting, so 'patience' isn't required either.
- AceJohnny2 9y ago> During World War II, those friends included Alan Turing, with whom Shannon struck up a lively intellectual exchange during Turing’s fact-finding trip to study American cryptography on behalf of the British government. This little tidbit has always fascinated me from a What-If perspective, because of course because of the War and secrecy, Turing and Shannon did not discuss cryptography, the Bombe (Turing's Enigma-cracking machine) or the Colossus (arguably the first electronic computer, except its very existence remained a secret until the 1970s). How would've things gone had they been able to talk freely?
- tr1ck5t3r 9y agoI find the whole subject of getting idea's to pop into one's head fascinating. After all where do ideas come from? Is it something akin to a religious or para normal experience that might one day be explained by the fledgling Quantum Physic's arena?
- datashovel 9y agoWas curious enough about the thesis paper, I went searching for it. http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11173/34541425-MIT.pdf?sequence=2 http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11173/34541425...
- lubujackson 9y agoThere seems to be a lot of parallels in how Shannon lived and how Feynman lived. Obviously, Feynman was more gregarious, but they both found inspiration and solace in curious play. I think more than curiosity, which most people have, they both showed a profound disinterest in hiding their interests or fear of looking dumb. That might be the biggest difference between smart guys who work jobs and geniuses who pave new paths. It is both sad and empowering because it means we simply get in our own way when we try to be "serious adults".
- danm07 9y agoBoy is this article filled with unwarranted hyperbole. And Tim Ferris, really? Substance is overwhelmingly like a self-improvement article, cherrypicking details to support whatever point the author stands to posit.
- mrweasel 9y ago>Substance is overwhelmingly like a self-improvement article Because many believe that if they just work or behave like a genius or successful entrepreneur they will be one as well. It's the mental equivalent of a trendy diet. It's not that there's not some interesting habits in the article, but people will focus on the easy bits and start riding unicycles, not reading their emails and leaving checks uncashed. Like diets, people want to hear things like: Eat a lemon with every meal and only poop on Thursdays. Allowing yourself to be mentored is hard, if it doesn't come natural to you. Being patient and keep working on problem for years on end is equally hard. It's not bad advise, it's just really hard to implement.
- lhuser123 9y agoWell, I find it very motivational.