How to do Great Work

A review of Richard Hamming's finest talk

There’s a good chance you haven't heard of Richard Hamming and until I read Naval Ravikant’s The Almanack I hadn’t either:

A beautiful essay, I highly recommend reading it. It’s ostensibly written for people who are in the scientific research, but I think it applies across the board. It’s just an old-timer essay on how to do great work. It reminds me of much of what Richard Feynman used to say, although I think Hamming has put it more eloquently than almost anywhere else I’ve seen.

Naval Ravikant

Born in Chicago, Hamming attended the University of Chicago, Nebraska and Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is widely known for his role in computer engineering. He worked on the infamous Manhattan Project in 1945, moved to Bell Laboratories soon after and received the Turing Award in 1968. He retired in 1976 and took up a position at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California where he worked as a Professor in Computer Science and spent his remaining time teaching and writing books.

You and Your Research

On March 7th 1986 Hamming delivered his famous talk ‘You and Your Research ’ to a few hundred people. The talk revolves around a question that Hamming had after 4 decades of working with scientists and Mathematicians “Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?” How do people do great work?

The talk is about Hamming’s observations of such a question and all that Hamming has learned from the great contributors he worked alongside and studied. Below are snippets of my favourite passages alongside some personal commentary.

I became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who might have done. I continued examining the questions, “Why?” and “What is the difference?” I continued subsequently by reading biographies, autobiographies, asking people questions such as: “How did you come to do this?” I tried to find out what are the differences.

Hamming clearly understood the difference between people who say and people who do things. He observed this in the projects he worked on and the laboratories he worked in but also from reading the biographies and autobiographies of people he deemed to have already figured stuff out. This is a great way to reverse engineer a problem. How did Steve Jobs create Apple? How did Jeff Bezos turn Amazon, a bookstore, into the biggest e-commerce business in the world? A lot of the answers you will be looking for will be in the books written by and for them.

Why shouldn't you set out to do something significant? You don't have to tell other people, but shouldn't you say to yourself, “Yes, I would like to do something significant.” Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can't, almost surely you are not going to.

The last line reminded me of Henry Ford when he said “If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right.” There are probably numerous versions of this saying dating back millennia and for good reason. Once you understand that it’s you and only you that has the power to muster change you are already on your way. The gap between believing you can do something and actioning it is courage. Some people get motivated by telling other people what they’re going to do and others prefer to keep it to themselves. Whichever way you choose is not important, but starting is.

What appears to be a fault, often, by a change of viewpoint, turns out to be one of the greatest assets you can have. Many scientists when they found they couldn't do a problem finally began to study why not. They then turned it around the other way and said, “But of course, this is what it is,” and got an important result. So ideal working conditions are very strange. The ones you want aren't always the best ones for you.

There are two things I thought of when I read this passage. The first one is inversion and the second is adaptability. The late Charlie Munger was famous for inverting almost everything. Do you want to be successful but don’t know where to start? Well, start by NOT doing what an unsuccessful person would do. Thinking about the opposite is almost always better than starting from the bottom up which can be laborious and full of assumptions. On adaptability, I have plenty of personal anecdotes and stories from my time in the Royal Marines. Training is the longest and most arduous basic military training in the world and in your training troop there could be up to 70/80 recruits. As people start to fall by the wayside it’s almost always an adaptability problem. They couldn’t adapt to being away from home, from being cold, from being tired or hungry. By the end, there were 13 people left. Those 13 men survived and thrived because they adapted the most. As Bruce Lee said, “Be like water”.

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!

This made me laugh and again another quote popped into my mind by Isaac Newton “If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results”.

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.

I hope his wife never heard this talk!

The steady application of effort with a little bit more work, intelligently applied is what does it. That's the trouble; drive, misapplied, doesn't get you anywhere. I've often wondered why so many of my good friends at Bell Labs who worked as hard or harder than I did, didn't have so much to show for it. The misapplication of effort is a very serious matter. Just hard work is not enough - it must be applied sensibly.

Comparing the three passages I like how Hamming uses the word thinking. Drive misapplied will almost always get you nowhere unless you happen to get on the right path from the get-go. You need to take time out to think, to ask questions and to assess. Using the analogy that knowledge is like compound interest is a great way to visualise it. Knowledge isn’t linear. You don’t read 1 book and instantly become smarter. Books, when read correctly and re-read alongside practical application and testing are what compounds knowledge. And just like compound interest, it can look as if nothing is happening and then all of a sudden the curve is exponential.

Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, “Do you mind if I join you?” They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, “What are the important problems of your field?” And after a week or so, “What important problems are you working on?” And after some more time I came in one day and said, “If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?” I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring. In the fall, Dave McCall stopped me in the hall and said, “Hamming, that remark of yours got underneath my skin. I thought about it all summer, i.e. what were the important problems in my field. I haven't changed my research,” he says, “But I think it was well worthwhile.” And I said, “Thank you Dave,” and went on. I noticed a couple of months later he was made the head of the department. I noticed the other day he was a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. I noticed he has succeeded. I have never heard the names of any of the other fellows at that table mentioned in science and scientific circles. They were unable to ask themselves, “What are the important problems in my field”?

Hamming is a fantastic storyteller who uses humour and wit to help make complex problems and questions more palatable. What are the important problems in my field? This was a question that Hamming demanded not only from himself but also from people who deemed themselves wanting to do great work. Again, Hamming stresses the importance of observation, questioning and reasoning. He wants to do great work but not at the expense of asking the most important questions.

I spoke earlier about planting acorns so that oaks will grow. You can't always know exactly where to be, but you can keep active in places where something might happen. And even if you believe that great science is a matter of luck, you can stand on a mountaintop where lightning strikes; you don't have to hide in the valley where you're safe. But the average scientist does routine safe work almost all the time and so he (or she) doesn't produce much. It's that simple. If you want to do great work, you clearly must work on important problems, and you should have an idea.

Planting acorns so that oaks will grow. There are again past-time versions of this remark but how true it is. The more acorns you plant the better your chances are of growing an oak tree, but you also have to be where oak trees can grow. Planting acorns and then expecting to find them in the sea is fruitless. Luck is an important caveat here but as Pasteur said “Luck favors the prepared mind.”

It isn't just a matter of the job, it's the way you write the report, the way you write the paper, the whole attitude. It's just as easy to do a broad, general job as one very special case. And it's much more satisfying and rewarding. I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion

People who do great work do great work, not for the fame, albeit perhaps there is a small proportion of people who do, but they do it because it’s their be-all and end-all. There is nothing else that they would rather be doing no matter how much money or fame you throw at them. Steve Jobs had more than enough money to retire after the iPhone came out but he loved his work more than anything. He was doing his work, great work, and he has helped to build an almost cult-like brand. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk (although Elon definitely loves the limelight) are another two. They’re on a mission to do great work, and to be remembered for giving humanity something that changes the course of its history. The struggle is worth more to them than any amount of money or fame can provide.

I believe that books which try to digest, coordinate, get rid of the duplication, get rid of the less fruitful methods and present the underlying ideas clearly of what we know now, will be the things the future generations will value.

I loved this paragraph because it sums up perfectly what Nassim Taleb calls ‘the Lindy effect’. Things that have been around for a long time are more than likely to be around for just as long. In 2000 years Christianity and Islam, The Romans and the Egyptians, Gold and silver will still be around. The same goes for books. The classics are classics for a reason and I’ve learned more from reading Seneca, a wealthy Stoic who tutored Emperor Nero some 2000 years ago than I have from reading any modern book. No matter how new you think something is, it more than likely has already been solved by somebody else a long time ago. My prediction is that this talk, which is currently older than me shall be around for a long time too.

Conclusion

This is the third or fourth time in the last year that I have read this talk. There is a link to the video on YouTube here if you’d prefer to watch it although, I would say to read it first and then listen. Throughout the talk, Hamming mentions famous people such as Feynman, Shannon, Tukey as well as himself and others who contributed to their respective fields. It would be easy to say it’s luck or as he says ‘Something in the air’ but you have to be where lightning strikes and that means you have to plant acorns so that Oak trees will grow. You have to put the work in and you have to do it properly.

Most people reading this won’t be concerned with physics and coding theory but with ordinary problems such as career choice, personal health and relationships. How do I find a job that I love? How do I get back to a body weight/shape I can bare to look at in the mirror? How do I be a good husband, father, brother, friend? Most people are not stupid enough to know what you need to do for all of those questions.

I made the difficult decision at 28 to go back to college after I left the Marines because the only job I could get was cleaning ovens nationwide for supermarkets for minimum wage. I had to travel hundreds of miles on a Thursday to get back home to go to college in the evening for 2 years. I was skint and my pride all but shattered but it humbled me. 6 years later I now have a degree equivalent qualification and co-run a business.

People find getting in shape to be one of life’s greatest mysteries but deep down they do understand how to do it. Burn more calories than you consume, over long periods of time, with progressive overloading training, eating mainly whole and unprocessed foods. When I say it’s that easy, it is. The first rebuttal might be ‘I don’t have time’ or ‘I’ve done that and it’s not worked for me’. I’m not here to judge but you know when you’re lying to yourself. You know when you’re trying to pull the wool over your own eyes. If you expend more calories than you consume over a long time period you will lose weight. It’s just science. Plain and simple. There’s even a guy who ate only McDonalds and lost weight. How? He ate fewer calories than he burnt. You can read it here

We all want to be better partners, siblings and friends and at times it can feel like an effort. Life gets in the way (mainly work) we feel tired in the evenings and want our weekends to ourselves to catch up on things. It’s a wheel that we jump on and run like a hamster every single week.

But by jumping off the wheel of asking the same questions as Hamming asked you too can do great work.

“I became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who might have done. I continued examining the questions, “Why?” and “What is the difference?” I continued subsequently by reading biographies, autobiographies, asking people questions such as: “How did you come to do this?” I tried to find out what are the differences”.

And how do you do great work? Hamming sums it up as perfectly and as hard as this.

And how do you do it? Just as I observe people doing it. It's just that simple and that hard.