I think the Hamming piece that circulates here infrequently is very insightful: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virg

I think the Hamming piece that circulates here infrequently is very insightful: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html > 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. 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, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this. On the other hand, I would also recommend caution here -- I strongly believe that some people simply have a much higher capacity/tolerance for work. John Carmack appears to have been able to sustain 80-hour weeks without burning out. I can't. I don't feel bad about this gap. This observation is pretty mundane; it's exactly the same way that the average person's psyche or physique simply can't tolerate the training workload of an olympic athlete. "Work harder" might be the right advice for someone who has excess capacity that they are not using. It might be terrible advice for someone who is already trending towards burnout working 50-hour weeks when their capacity is 40-hour weeks. There's an element of self-knowledge required to honestly evaluate yourself and determine exactly how capable you are. (Of course -- push yourself sometimes. You might surprise yourself. I personally think it's a good experience to have pushed up against burnout on a project I care about, to know what my limits are. But I don't aspire to ride that line in perpetuity.)