Given the Bell Labs mention, you may be thinking of Hamming's talk “You and Your Research” (https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://

Given the Bell Labs mention, you may be thinking of Hamming's talk “You and Your Research” (https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html), where that idea is mentioned: > Now for the matter of 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.” I simply slunk out of the office! > What Bode was saying was this: “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. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly 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. Slightly edited in the version published at https://d37ugbyn3rpeym.cloudfront.net/stripe-press/TAODSAE_zine_press.pdf https://d37ugbyn3rpeym.cloudfront.net/stripe-press/TAODSAE_z... (linked from https://press.stripe.com/ https://press.stripe.com/): > Now to the matter of drive. Looking around, you can easily observe that great people have a great deal of drive to do things. I had worked with John Tukey for some years before I found he was essentially my age, so I went to our mutual boss and asked him, “How can anyone my age know as much as John Tukey does?” He leaned back, grinned, and said, “You would be surprised how much you would know if you had worked as hard as he has for as many years.” There was nothing for me to do but slink out of his office, which I did. I thought about the remark for some weeks and decided that while I could never work as hard as John did, I could do a lot better than I had been doing. > 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, etc. I do not know what compound interest rate to assign, but it must be well over 6%—one extra hour per day over a lifetime will much more than double the total output. The steady application of a bit more effort has a great total accumulation. Looks like there also exists a video of the talk: https://youtu.be/a1zDuOPkMSw https://youtu.be/a1zDuOPkMSw