That's a very interesting essay indeed. Some thoughts:

You see again and again, that it is more than one thing from a good person. Once in a while a person does only one thing in his whole life, and we'll talk about that later, but a lot of times there is repetition. I claim that luck will not cover everything.

I agree, but I'm reminded of the story of the mathematician on great generals. That's not necessarily the case here, but it is something to think about.

Most of you in this room probably have more than enough brains to do first-class work. But great work is something else than mere brains.

Indeed I'm reminded of Scott Alexander's comments on the Good Judgment Project and how although there is a correlation correct people aren't necessarily the smartest people.

Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can.

Courage is a non-technical term which I hate. I think he means disagreeableness based on his wording which I'd agree that excessive agreeableness is probably more detrimental than excessive disagreeableness, but it seems like maximal disagreeableness would also be bad.

Very clearly they are not because people are often most productive when working conditions are bad. One of the better times of the Cambridge Physical Laboratories was when they had practically shacks - they did some of the best physics ever.

So less funding is better? (Yes, sentence fragment, get over it) That is an interesting idea. Most people, including a couple commenters on this post, would probably disagree with that. The drugmonkey blog spends many words complaining about funding issues. I'm wondering about possible confounds assuming this is a real phenomenon. Is it the lack of funding, the lack of respect, the isolation of having fewer researchers in one area (too many cooks problem)?

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.

I'm not sure how someone could've figured this out. Maybe this is owing to my lack of experience; this is something you can only discover in your 50s or 60s after several decades of seeing people working on difficult problems. I'm not sure I trust this.

On this matter of drive Edison says, ``Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.'' He may have been exaggerating, but the idea is that solid work, steadily applied, gets you surprisingly far.

I strongly doubt this is true. If the majority of possibilities are wrong, then improving search algorithms should have a bigger payoff than increasing productivity although there is a proper balance that needs to be found.

They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. These seem like orthagonal ideas; not necessarily opposed ones as he suggests.

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! … The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems.

Oh! That's why you said I should read this.

I'm way off-task, so I'll come back to this after I finish some work. It is a fascinating read though. Thank you.

To clarify, that's a talk ("You and Your Research") given by Richard Hamming, a computing pioneer at Bell Labs. Paul Graham is just hosting it.