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. ― RICHARD HAMMING ―
The principle that all results are cumulative – and not just within a narrow field of expertise – was something I conceived of perhaps a
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year ago. If this is a widely known phenomenon then it has certainly eluded me for most of my life.
Before reading the essay of Richard Hamming from which I
borrowed the quote above, I had only seen it mentioned before on a few occasions: in Stephen King’s book On Writing, in Stephen Pressfield’s book The War of Art, and in William Osler’s pamphlet A Way of Life.
These three distinguished gentlemen mention briefly that the longer they sit and write, the more ideas they get. Winston Churchill also alludes to it in passing in his autobiographic book My Early Days. More specifically, he provides an example of his first political speech and how he noticed that once his mind was warmed up, he could come up with a lot of cool punch lines; more than enough to go around for a single speech.
On a second thought, I did make use of this principle when I was younger and wrote rhymes; sometimes I would write an
inexhaustible amount of rhymes and feel infinitively creative; like there was no end to how long I could keep going, but most times I didn’t really take the time and ended up writing a few rhymes a day only.
In either case, this principle is incredibly valid, and I can’t believe I ever did any type of work – especially ‘creative work’, before grasping it.
If people knew about the principle of cumulative focus I suspect they would find within themselves sufficient motivation to stop their incessant multitasking and find ways of reducing unnecessary interruptions while performing a task.
Time and Cumulativeness
Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher and polymath, said that the notion of genius is misunderstood; a genius is a person like any other, but he chooses to hold his focus on a certain question or problem for a prolonged period of time without letting it go until it makes sense to him. Blaise Pascal, a genius in all regards, said the same thing.
One way that this cumulative increase in focus manifests itself is that if you think about a complex matter it may not yield any results until a certain threshold of time has been breached. I believe this principle lies closely at hand as to why we have to put in the adequate amount of time in order to push through the plateau. Both Stephen King and Stephen Pressfield give examples of how when they sit down to write they often cannot come up with anything at first, then after a while inspiration will hit them from nowhere – usually more so the longer
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they sit down to write. I concur with this from personal experience, and it is one of the major reasons why I often fast for two days a week.
Always remember that your time is finite and that you will die. With this in mind, let us imagine that you will conceive of a total of one billion thoughts during your lifetime. The quality of your
consciousness and understanding will determine what thoughts you are capable of conceiving of. The earlier in life you decide what to think about and the longer you think about these things the better your understanding will get, and this in turn will make you
understand more.
Imagine that you are walking down a path: the sooner you start walking down the path, and the fewer detours you take, the further you will be able to go. Will you stop at every chance you get to smell the roses or will you keep moving? Perhaps you will go further than anyone else if you start now.
It can be good to keep your options open – but remember: by keeping your options open you are failing to make a decision regarding how to spend your time. Time is your most valuable resource because it is the only thing that is truly scarce. To stall is to die slowly. The longer you keep your options open and remain inactive, the less you will benefit by the principle of cumulative results. If you do not start making definite moves NOW you will become less immersed into the path of your choice.
Lack of Mastery
Einstein thought about his theory of relativity for a great many years before being able to concretize it. He held his focus on a particular subject for an abnormally long time. I would not be surprised if this was the reason why his brain turned out to look different compared to that of a normal person.
If you’ve taken chemistry you probably know of ‘Bucky balls’
(Fullerene). They are named after R. Buckminster Fuller, who spent over 50 years in fanatically philosophizing and pursuing questions regarding the future of mankind and how the human race can become more efficient. He was very interested in finding ways of improving life on Earth, and eventually, in space. Buckminster Fuller represents the epitome of efficiency in all matters thinkable. He was able to get by on 2 hours of rest per day divided up in several 20-30 minute periods dispersed throughout the day and he traveled so much that he wore several different watches to keep up with the different time zones. He had many remarkable quirks.
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From an early age Elon Musk came to the conclusion that the most severe problems mankind will face during our generation will be: the energy crisis, the condition of our environment, and space travel. At slightly over 40 years of age he has already played a crucial part in all of those areas by creating and selling PayPal, founding Tesla Motors, and founding SpaceX.
* * *
Those guys were all focusing their thoughts very deeply on a few important issues. Now, I don’t know for sure about Elon Musk, but I know that Buckminster Fuller and Einstein spent almost all of their waking time focusing on their respective questions.
And what do most ‘normal’ people do?
Most people do not think very deeply about any particular field of specialization or subject. They think very broadly, and often about similar subjects – the same as everybody else. The reason for this is because people are plugged into more or less the same sources of information. They busy themselves with mainstream media and recent sports events. Naturally, this leads to a very dispersed and shallow understanding of things. This ‘broadness’ and dispersion of thought and knowledge might win a watered-down quiz show on TV, but it won’t do much good in the real world.
By continually diverting their focus, people rarely get to tap into this cumulative effect of focus and inspiration. And besides, now that they have formed bad habits, have a lousy reward system, and their
attention spans are low, they will instinctively avoid pushing through the plateau as a result of unconsciously reacting to homeostasis. In other words, they are like rats running tracks in their negative feedback loops. Their spoils of the cumulative effect are either non- existent or negative. They are trapped in the vice of homeostasis. Ok. So the gist of it is:
1. People accumulate bad habits and addictions such as multitasking, eating unhealthy, not working out, etc. 2. This gives rise to a lousy reward system, meaning that
they associate pleasure with these unproductive activities and their brains are in a poor shape and will get duller with time.
3. This often leads to a poor ability of concentration and remaining focused on a train of thought, a question, or on a goal.
4. This inefficient and dissatisfying way of operating is held together by homeostasis which makes it hard to change.
5. There is no positive cumulative effect to speak of for most people.
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Creative vs Practical
I just mentioned how people tend not to stick with an idea or a thought for any longer period of time, and thus they forgo the power of cumulative focus and inspiration in the short-term. In the long- term the result of this is that they don’t create new things (ideas in general, inventions, businesses, etc.). That’s the mental and creative aspect of it.
But we also have the ‘physical aspect’ – such as undertaking an activity. This is written about extensively in the book Mastery by George Leonard.
Leonard writes about how most people are dabblers – meaning that they try different things shallowly and will continue for as long as it goes well, but as soon as it gets difficult or uncomfortable they quit. The main reason behind their decision to quit is because their egos are rather fragile and they can’t handle it when they don’t get the validation they feel they deserve. They might have a fixed picture of themselves as being too good to fail, and thus when they get to the point where they can’t pull it off on the first attempt it goes against their self-image and they are forced to quit if that view of themselves is to keep on existing. From the confines of this book we could also take it a step further by saying that dabblers are in unconscious reaction to homeostasis and instinctively don’t want to exert more energy than they minimally have to, they have little pain tolerance or self-discipline. Dabblers have very little reference points of breaking out of homeostasis.
Dabblers are commonly found in the gym during January, but gone in February.