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I would expand that to hard work on important problems. Many scientists worked as hard as Einstein, but few stuck to the major problems as much as he did. After

I would expand that to hard work on important problems. Many scientists worked as hard as Einstein, but few stuck to the major problems as much as he did. After years of no progress most people will opt to solve an easier, lower-priority problem than continue working on a difficult but important one. A good essay on this is Richard Hamming's You and Your Research[0]. A good set of articles focused on the practical issue of overcoming the tendency to focus on easy problems is Eliezer Yudkowsky's Challenging the Difficult series[1]. I particularly like the phrase "Shut up and do the Impossible!" I have found this highly effective in getting myself to work on hard problems (here I'm defining "hard" as problems where my initial reaction is "that's impossible!", or something similar.) [0]: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html [1]: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Challenging_the_Difficult http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Challenging_the_Difficult

Florin_Andrei 13y ago
I wonder if this focus on tackling hard problems - problems which had the potential to end up being downright unsolvable and a waste of time - might have been facilitated by the fact that he was a clerk in a patent office and had, so to speak, nothing to lose. If he had wasted 8 years, so what? It would not have made his situation any worse. Whereas an acknowledged figure in the academia needs to defend status and name and function. So they are perhaps less motivated to deal with bet-the-farm ideas.
- mtdewcmu 13y ago
  Exactly right. Einstein had no disincentive from taking on the hardest problems, since he had no responsibility to show results. On the other hand, Einstein had no direct incentive to work on physics at all. He had a restless mind, and was in some ways fortunate to be thinking compulsively about the right problems at the right time.

Florin_Andrei 13y ago

I wonder if this focus on tackling hard problems - problems which had the potential to end up being downright unsolvable and a waste of time - might have been facilitated by the fact that he was a clerk in a patent office and had, so to speak, nothing to lose. If he had wasted 8 years, so what? It would not have made his situation any worse. Whereas an acknowledged figure in the academia needs to defend status and name and function. So they are perhaps less motivated to deal with bet-the-farm ideas.

mtdewcmu 13y ago
Exactly right. Einstein had no disincentive from taking on the hardest problems, since he had no responsibility to show results. On the other hand, Einstein had no direct incentive to work on physics at all. He had a restless mind, and was in some ways fortunate to be thinking compulsively about the right problems at the right time.