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Ask HN: Need help finding an article

1 pointjmatthews1 comment

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?

    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!

"You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming.

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.

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