If you don't work on important problems, it's not likely that you'll do important work.
Interpretation
Focusing on significant challenges is essential for making a meaningful impact.
Richard Hamming emphasizes the importance of engaging with major issues in our work. By dedicating our efforts to significant problems, we increase the likelihood of producing valuable and impactful outcomes, rather than merely producing work that lacks importance.
In practice
During a conference on innovation, one could use this quote to inspire others to tackle big challenges.
When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did [Claude Elwood] Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you.
Science is composed of laws which were originally based on a small, carefully selected set of observations, often not very accurately measured originally; but the laws have later been found to apply over much wider ranges of observations and much more accurately than the original data justified.
Does anyone believe that the difference between the Lebesgue and Riemann integrals can have physical significance, and that whether say, an airplane would or would not fly could depend on this difference? If such were claimed, I should not care to fly in that plane.
Beware of finding what you're looking for._x000D_ _x000D_ A favorite aphorism he often used.
One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can't, almost surely you are not going to.
Put glibly:_x000D_ _x000D_ In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it._x000D_ _x000D_ In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it._x000D_ _x000D_ Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state.
No one can shed light on vices he does not have or afflictions he has ever experienced.
Here I am, fifty-eight, and I still don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up.
Experience is a good school. But the fees are high.
Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds.
Their silence is praise enough.
If there were no night, we would not appreciate the day, nor could we see the stars and the vastness of the heavens. We must partake of the bitter with the sweet. There is a divine purpose in the adversities we encounter every day. They prepare, they purge, they purify, and thus they bless.
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