

Ask HN: Need help finding an article - jmatthews

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 &quot;imagine if you worked as hard as he does&quot;. He goes on to discuss how this conversation changed his world view and his work habits.<p>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?
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ColinWright

        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](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.

