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Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

nautil.us

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Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#231

Post by CuriouslyC »

kamaal wrote: post #83
CuriouslyC wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being creative is like tending a garden. Ideas grow on their own, and all you can really do is prepare the environment to facilitate this growth. You do this by clearly defining the problem, fertilizing your mind with inspiration, and revisiting the problem periodically to keep it present. From there, you need to relax and let your brain do its thing. Actively thinking/concentrating actually inhibits brain activity i…

Not exactly: "Opportunities multiply as they are seized." - Sun Tzu One way to have good ideas is to have a lot of them and then filter. Even in highly creative endeavors like say music and painting, volume of work largely matters. You have to spend a lot of time(years) doing a lot of work before you get anywhere close to good.

Hard work is what you do once you have a creative direction. Before you have creative direction, you need "work hard" fertilizing your mind with inspirational material, then relax and let your brain create connections on its own. This process might need to be repeated frequently, but it is how big ideas are grown.

Think of your potential idea space like a box. When you relax the box moves around and reconfigures itself into different shapes. If you are actively thinking, this locks the box in the current location and shape. This can be useful when you want to explore the current box a bit more, but there is only so much exploring you can do within the current box before you are just retracing your steps. If you are always in explore mode without letting the box move and reconfigure you're just going to generate small variations on the same old ideas.

Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#232

Post by trentmb »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #207
matwood wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if you are operating at the top of the pyramid of knowledge, like some of the people mentioned in the article, that's a different kind of effort. Yeah, it's an effort they are probably thinking about 24/7. Defining 'knowledge work' is challenging because so much of the 'work' happens when the person is not sitting at the computer/desk. Creative work is similar. Instead of saying so and so worked 4 hours/day, we…

I think it's virtually certain that, if they are indeed top figures in their fields, it's guaranteed that they are deeply involved in their work, and that means their subconscious minds are processing that stuff non-stop. But the subconscious is a funny thing, because it doesn't seem to require "effort" to operate, however you may define that notion. It's the fully conscious, purposeful, organized work that requires…

> Not even sure how to define these things properly, but everyone seems to understand them intuitively.

Focused vs. diffuse thinking.

Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#234

Post by gthtjtkt »

exergy wrote: post #205
gthtjtkt wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MOST successful people work very hard. Surprising right? Duh. If you're going to complain about an author making unsubstantiated generalizations, you should probably avoid doing the same.

I'm not OP, but this is an interesting moment to ask: would you not consider the "I worked harder than others, therefore I'm more successful" sentiment self evident? In my experience, people in my group whom I'd categorize as "successful" have often been confident in making peace/having passion for the vocation of their choice, and have paid their dues so to speak, in terms of research papers read, hours spent with t…

> would you not consider the "I worked harder than others, therefore I'm more successful" sentiment self evident?

Not at all.

We can swap anecdotes about successful people all day, but the fact of the matter is that hard work guarantees nothing, and it's not a prerequisite for success.

Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#235

Post by Loic »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #197
TheCowboy wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is so much aggression here. Relax. Working longer hours isn't equivalent to working harder. Plenty of unsuccessful entrepreneurs worked long hours and worked hard, and there are examples of people/businesses doing productive work with more balanced workdays. 99% of the people in the world live in a way to not be successful, but to have a balanced life with happiness? It should be obvious that for 99% of people,…

It's pretty clear that doing the 80 hour week is something that works well if you're, say, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. A difficult job, to be sure, but not top-notch in the grand scheme of things. You're not inventing quantum mechanics, you're figuring out ways for people to share more cat pictures. But if you are operating at the top of the pyramid of knowledge, like some of the people mentioned in the article, t…

After about 10 years of consulting in the field of thermodynamics, my week of work has now settled to 25h. I simply cannot be efficient after 4 to 5h of intensive work in this field. What is interesting is that not a single customer complained about it.

Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#236

Post by meheleventyone »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #194
gregmac wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if your life goal is NOT about being successful but more about living a balanced life with happiness What good is (your definition of) success if you do nothing but work and are unhappy? Or did you mean something else by this?

Why would you not be happy if you achieve what you want in life? Sure it's a stressful journey, but if you ask me if i would pick between a life that actually served a purpose vs. a life I just lived because I lived, I would pick one that aimed to serve a purpose any day, no matter how stressful it is. You may think living a balanced "happy" life is happiness, but when you're at your deathbed and think back at your l…

I think it's can be more the realisation that the achievement you thought you wanted wasn't actually what was important to you. For example seeking fame and status because you have low self-esteem is famously not a great way to feel better about yourself.

Further even Maslow acknowledged that the level taxonomy he came up with was fluid. How could it not? Being a model and not a description of reality. Self-actualisation is a really broad categorisation that can include things that to another person might look like "a life just lived" but has real import in reality.

Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#237

Post by gwern »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #98
jfv wrote: post #96

Maybe I missed it in this story, but this anecdote about Poincare himself is apropos: "The famous French mathematician Henri Poincaré was very interested in mathematical creativity. He describes a period of hard and seemingly fruitless effort to solve a problem, from which he took a break to join a geological expedition. As he was stepping on a bus, he made one of the most important breakthroughs of his life. The sol…

Similar to what Gelman said about what he called the Feynman method: "Step one: write down the problem statement. Step 2: think real hard. Step 3: write down the problem solution." His point was, I think, that not every scientist can work that way. Some are real treasures, come along one in a generation.

There's a better Feynman method: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-le...

> Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: "How did he do it? He must be a genius!"

Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#238

Post by WalterSear »

Sharlin wrote: post #221
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you not be happy if you achieve what you want in life? Sure it's a stressful journey, but if you ask me if i would pick between a life that actually served a purpose vs. a life I just lived because I lived, I would pick one that aimed to serve a purpose any day, no matter how stressful it is. You may think living a balanced "happy" life is happiness, but when you're at your deathbed and think back at your l…

As far as I know, most people wish on their deathbeds that they'd have worked less, been with their loved ones more, and generally would have done more anything else than work. I get that there are extremely driven individuals who want to achieve great things - and some of them are even able to do so - but articles like this should be understood in the context of a culture where common people work themselves to death…

> "As far as I know, most people wish on their deathbeds that they'd have worked less, been with their loved ones more, and generally would have done more anything else than work."

No, this is just a hackneyed cliche that gets repeated every time work-life balance gets discussed.

I know quite a few people in late middle age that dearly wish they have worked harder and earned more money, now that they need it and can't.

Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#239

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

agentgt wrote: post #218
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #144

They take a very constrained example and claim that "You should be a slacker too". This is at best an irresponsible piece of writing that's clearly targeting discussions like what's happening here. This is the 1000th time I've seen a post on this topic on HN, and every time it's posted here it's like groundhog day, same comments. Well this is what publications like these want, they want more traffic. There are many f…

> Also, if you want to succeed, don't listen to these idiots. Statistically those who work harder succeed more. Period. I'm mean I generally agree but one thing I really can't stand is people believing that success is entirely hard work. The reality is most of success is "standing on the shoulder of giants". People are generally successful if they are given a massive starting advantage. That starting advantage could…

I didn't say that. This is why it's hard to have civil discussion online because people take words out of context and use whatever interpretation they have.

If you are one of the people who are in unfortunate situations, you can choose to live two different lives: either believe that you're done for and live a loser life, or try hard to get out of it.

It's your choice, but there's plenty of evidence where people who came from the bottom rose to the top by working hard (and I mean "top" as in someone who's made world-changing achievements)

Re: Many famous scientists have something in common: they didn’t work long hours

#240

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

megalodon wrote: post #225
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'm not conflating anything more than what this article is doing. On the other hand, you are guilty of taking my words out of context. It's convenient to just take michael jordan and use it as an argument, isn't it? I also mentioned another "knowledge work" example. I'm not saying scientists should be working 18 hours a day. In fact when it comes to scientists and researchers I do agree that you should NOT work too h…

You can't count productivity in hours. Someone who goes "all-in" 6 hours a day can certainly accomplish more than someone who says they go "all-in" 12 hours a day.

tell me where I even mentioned "hours". really.
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