Timeless Career Lessons from “You and Your Research” by Richard Hamming

by Jonah Goldberg


Having an impact in modern organizations takes much more than executing tasks effectively. One needs the capacities to think ahead about what will need to be done and to work on their business as much as they work in their business, looking to outside sources for new skills and mental models and being intentional about the projects and responsibilities they take on.


The question of what stops many bright people from doing Great Work is one that preoccupied Richard Hamming for the bulk of his career. Hamming (1915-1988), an American mathematician, was known for always working on next year’s problems. He was instrumental in programming for the Manhattan Project, as well as being involved in nearly every prize-winning research project that came out of Bell Laboratories during his 30 years there. In 1976, Hamming shifted to working as a professor of computer science at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, devoting the end of his career to teaching and writing. 


“You and Your Research” is the last lecture Hamming ever gave, imparting a lifelong education in how to identify and tackle important problems in your field, research or otherwise; when to move into management; and what traits to cultivate for anyone who desires to make their mark.


In this article, I will introduce four big ideas from “You and Your Research.”

You can listen to the entire lecture and Q&A here and read a transcript here.



Change your field throughout your career to prevent getting entrenched in one way of doing things.


Hamming advocates for shifting one’s focus every seven years—not jumping from advertising to law, for example, but perhaps expanding from advertising to content marketing or PR. The benefits of this exercise are 1) to expose ourselves to new ideas, frameworks and methods that we may have never otherwise found, and 2) to keep ourselves humble, reminding ourselves that we can’t know or control everything and need to adapt to evolving markets. The risks of entrenchment—and the benefits of purposeful exploration of new perspectives—have been validated by research done by Olin Professor Erik Dane. Aligning with Dane’s research, which suggests that the right work environment or practices can counteract entrenchment, Hamming even encourages management to mandate these shifts for their employees:


I would insist on a change because I'm serious. What happens to the old fellows is that they get a technique going; they keep on using it. They were marching in that direction which was right then, but the world changes. There's the new direction, but the old fellows are still marching in their former direction.

You need to get into a new field to get new viewpoints and before you use up all the old ones. You can do something about this, but it takes effort and energy. It takes courage to say, “Yes, I will give up my great reputation.”


Restarting at any level is a difficult and brave choice, given the ladder-like structure of the American workplace. However, there are many less drastic steps we can take that capture the benefits of trying something new. 


One small-scale way Hamming embodied this idea was when he began to have lunch with the physicists at Bell Labs instead of with the other mathematicians. Talking with an expert in a different area dramatically helped both sides in their own work. You can make it a point to learn about how another department in your organization functions, in doing so gaining a more nuanced understanding of your own work, or speak with someone who performs a similar role in a different context, such as a for-profit startup seeing how nonprofits handle fundraising before beginning their own next funding round.


Another way to keep yourself updated and sharp is to give yourself a quarterly or annual review, looking specifically for actions you regularly take that you have not put much forethought into. For example, you might write in a journal: “I’ve fallen into a certain rhythm for how I lead meetings. Can I ask anyone on my team how effective my style is for their comprehension and motivation? Or, is there research available on best practices that I can look at to make any helpful tweaks?” Taking an occasional outside, objective look at our habits can be a useful, self-generated learning process.



Move into management when your vision of what you want to do is bigger than what you can do single-handedly.


I went to my boss, Bode, one day and said, “Why did you ever become department head? Why didn't you just be a good scientist?” He said, “Hamming, I had a vision of what mathematics should be in Bell Laboratories. And I saw if that vision was going to be realized, I had to make it happen; I had to be department head.” When your vision of what you want to do is what you can do single-handedly, then you should pursue it. The day your vision, what you think needs to be done, is bigger than what you can do single-handedly, then you have to move toward management. And the bigger the vision is, the further in management you have to go.


Hamming notes that, at every step, choosing between holding a higher leadership position and doing more of the concrete work is one that must be made firmly. One counterintuitive struggle many rising managers face lies in how much control needs to be given up. This is most easily seen in fields like journalism—moving from being a writer to a managing editor means you are no longer writing stories full time. You can choose topics and give feedback on tone to align with your vision for the section or publication, but all the small choices that you may have felt attached to must be trusted to your team. Good employees will innovate on your systems, and fighting them to have everything done the way you did will devour all of the time you need to devote to strategy and process. Another reason to call it “micromanaging” is that you drastically reduce the scale of your own impact.


Between management and bench work, neither path is better than the other, but it is almost impossible to do both, and we should commit to the step we take.



Work with the system, and it will support you; work against it, and it will hold you back.


Hamming gives a few powerful examples of how small ways of exerting your ego against others add up over time. In his own experience, after moving from Los Alamos to New York City, he quickly noticed that he was receiving worse service than other customers at the computing center where he rented time. He knew that no one had ordered their employees to give Hamming a harder time, and he realized that the only difference between him and other customers was the way he dressed—like a Westerner—and in a way that the staff must have viewed as unprofessional. 


This left Hamming with a choice: dress the way that was most comfortable to him and argue that it should not make a difference or appear to conform better. When he began dressing like the staff felt someone in his situation should, the service he received improved. He knew enough not to let his appearance or manners get in the way of what he truly cared about.


This mindset echoes an idea from the Harvard Business Review article “Managing Authenticity” by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones. The authors believe that "...great leaders seem to know which personality traits they should reveal to whom and when. They are like chameleons, capable of adapting to the demands of the situations they face and the people they lead, yet they do not lose their identities in the process." 


This is not to say that seriously unjust practices should not be protested. But everyone needs to pick their battles. It is an unfortunate truth that one cannot spend all their energy on both fighting the system and producing great work. The message here is not to show a different face to different people, just to put on different hats as needed over your same core identity. We all do this naturally, often unconsciously, all the time. Sociolinguists call it code-switching: The way you speak to your parents is different in word choice and tone from the way you speak to your friends, but neither one is a dishonest representation of yourself. Learning to code-switch for different professional contexts to pass over potential conflicts or smooth over differences can be just another skill, not a personal sacrifice. You can trust your gut on where the line is. For example, making self-deprecating jokes about an identity you hold to get along with a supervisor will feel physically much worse than writing reports in the unnecessarily time-consuming format a supervisor prefers. You will know when you need to speak out.


By realizing you have to use the system and studying how to get the system to do your work, you learn how to adapt the system to your desires. Or, you can fight it steadily, as a small undeclared war, for the whole of your life.



Set aside Friday afternoons for Great Thoughts only.


Hamming switched from sitting at the physics table to the chemistry table after the people he felt were the greatest minds there had moved away after Nobel Prizes and promotions. One day he asked the chemists what the important problems in their field were. A week later, he asked which important problems they were working on. The answers did not line up. None of these brilliant scientists were tackling the problems they felt were important, nor working on smaller problems that they hoped would contribute to the important problems. Of course, they would not be as successful! 


This inspired Hamming to make time each week specifically to orient himself toward the long-term horizon. For him, one monumental outcome was recognizing, in the 1950s, that computers would revolutionize science and industry. He educated his bosses at Bell Labs to give more attention and resources to computing, and he proved his disbelieving colleagues more and more wrong as the decades went by.


Hamming offers a few concrete tips for fostering Great Thoughts.



The present growth of knowledge will choke itself off until we get different tools. I believe that books that try to digest, coordinate, get rid of the duplication, get rid of the less fruitful methods and present the underlying ideas clearly of what we know now will be the things the future generations will value.




I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later, somehow, you don't quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.