Me and My Life

[packbat]

1 July 1985: I am born.
7 March 1986: Richard W. Hamming gives a speech entitled "You and Your Research" that includes this part-of-a-paragraph:

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?" (emphasis added)

circa 2000-2003: I read said speech off a printout m'dad had lying around. I am greatly impressed.
Ten minutes ago: I realize that this is relevant to my own life, to what I want to do in grad school and after.

Comments

Hell-yes-and-good-BUT ...

[roaminrob.livejournal.com]

...for the past few years I've been focusing on something I think is Important(tm), and I've had some success, and some failure, though I don't think there's anyone that can say that I haven't been putting all of myself into it.

Anyway, there's Big Important, and Small Important, and I'm not really sure which you're referring to. Not too many folks with a lot of drive set themselves to Small Important things, because the rewards for small important things are more modest, and it takes a certain amount of ego to develop the drive to do important things in the first place.

So, a lot of folks shoot for Big Important, and there's two consequences of this. First, for every big important thing that gets done, a whole bunch of folks somewhere had to get the small important stuff out of the way. Second, big important just kills you.

Sometimes, literally.

Concentrating your efforts on something that's important is a fantastic thing that I'd never talk anybody out of. In fact, I wish a lot more people would do it. But, there's also something to be said for the importance of living a life you really enjoy, and you often have to sacrifice a lot of that to get the really important stuff done.

Me, I still struggle over which is more important.

Re: Hell-yes-and-good-BUT ...

[packbat.livejournal.com]

That's a really good point, actually. There's another factor in there as well: to wit, quite frequently the small-important things are what leads to the really big-important things – like the photoelectric effect inspiring quantum physics.

I can't really work on big-important in this context, anyway – it's a Master's, not a post-doc. But I do want to make knowledge that will be helpful fifty years from now.