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Do Significant Work
The Stripe Press just published a beautiful reprint of Richard Hamming’s The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, which led me (and quite a few others, I imagine) to read some of his work for the first time. The written form of his lecture, “You and Your Research”, is chapter thirty of the book (go read it if you haven’t).
It opens with Hamming admitting that the lecture could just as easily be called “You and Your Engineering Career,” or even “You and Your Career”. He suggests that we should try to do significant things in our careers, rather than insignificant things. Hamming means ‘significant’ in the ‘significant to mankind’ sense, what he says applies to the ‘personally significant’ just as well. To do significant things, we need to:
- Focus on the most important problems you can try to solve
- Work at those problems consistently
- Be excellent in our work
Not everyone can chose to work on they believe to be the Important Problems. Being able to do so is definitely a sort of privilege. However, there will always be problems that are the most important within your ability to solve. Hamming says to work on those.
You can apply this recursively. What’s the most important piece of the important problem you’re solving? Focus on that. It sounds simple, but is everyone you know working on…
