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Ask HN: Need help finding an article
There is an essay that featrues a scientist telling a story of when he was working at Bell Labs or one of the tech epicenters and he was jealous of another scientist, his supervisors says something to the effect of "imagine if you worked as hard as he does". He goes on to discuss how this conversation changed his world view and his work habits.
My google-fu has failed me on this one. DOes that ring a bell for anyone and could you provide a link or a search term please?
- ColinWright 11y agoNow 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! "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html If you had included contact details in your HN profile I could also have sent this to you directly.