[ MAIN IDEA ]
Richard Hamming was a 20th-century mathematician who surrounded himself with greatness: Feynman, Oppenheimer, Shannon, and his colleagues at Bell Labs. He started wondering why some of his smart colleagues did significant work, while others, although smart, only did mediocre work.
In an incredible essay, he gives his answer. The ones who achieved great work had:
The courage to seek the significant problems
The humility to resist their egos
The mental preparation to pounce upon a “lucky” opportunity
The first point surprised me the most.
“Of course you have to work on the significant problems to make a significant contribution,” I thought indignantly.
But then I reflected on my own project choices, and realized much of my work was small-minded and inconsequential to others.
I’m not alone. Most of the people Hamming worked with at Bell Labs, although top 1% thinkers, never stopped to identify the most pressing problems in their field. Hamming would go to the Chemistry or Physics tables at lunch and play the fool, asking them what the top problems were. Then he’d find out what each of them was working on. Finally, he’d ask why they were all wasting their time on problems that — by their own admission — weren’t significant. (He then had to find a new lunch table.)
[ THE TRAP ]
The trap for us who aren’t working with the top 1% is to pretend like we’re at the modern Bell Labs. You and I are going to be massively impacted by AI, but we’re not going to contribute to AI chip architecture like an Nvidia engineer might. We’re not going to become a Shannon, Hamming, or Sutskever. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do significant work.
[ THE WAY OUT]
How to have top 1% significance without having top 1% intellect.
Niche. Instead of trying to compete with frontier labs on LLM engineering, combine AI with other domains and become an expert on the combination. For example: AI engineering for solo bootstrap founders with 10k in savings, 2+ years of coding experience, and building B2C iOS apps for US-based marketing firms with $500k+ ad budgets. That’s a lot easier than competing on just AI.
Leverage your work style. Your interests can help you pick a niche, yes. But you can work in a way that complements your natural way of consuming and producing. For example, I love to read, write, and watch ASMR cooking videos. I take what I’ve learned from my readings to write things like this. Then I record ASMR-style videos, add a voice-over track, and turn it into a quick YouTube video. Whereas my old YouTube videos were complicated and draining, this approach actually gives me energy and makes it easy to stay consistent.
Leverage your experience. There’s an epidemic of brain-fried iPad kids who’ve spent a decade of their youth scrolling. But young CEO Roy Lee points out how that’s their advantage, because they know what’s good. They know what type of video makes them stop scrolling. It’s become a deep-seated intuition, enough so that they can make these types of videos themselves and sell them to marketing firms. Millennials or Gen X could do the same, but we don’t have the same intuition for the vertical medium that a 16-year-old kid who's spent 4 hours a day for the last ten years scrolling does.
All of these tips are variations on the same thing: If you can’t do significant work in one single domain, keep stacking domains until you can.
AI + consumer + indies + marketing + US
Reading + writing + ASMR + YouTube
Shortform + marketing + Gen Z
[ INSPO ]
The 3 Hidden AI Gold Rushes | Roy Lee x Jack Neel Podcast (youtube.com)