

Is It Too Late to Start a Successful Startup? (Are You Too Old?) - burritofanatic
http://www.williamha.com/is-it-too-late-to-start-a-successful-startup/

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riffraff
I suspect, this paragraph from "You and your research"[0] applies as much to
knowledge as to most other endeavours:

> 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!

> 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.

[0]
[http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)

~~~
MichaelCrawford
Richard Feynman's second wife divorced him for among other reasons he was
"always doing his calculus".

