the only way to win

Richard Hamming explained it to a room at Bellcore in 1986. It reads differently now that the typing is free.

Immerse yourself in the work. It’s the only way to win.

That sounds like a poster. It’s a mechanism, and Hamming laid it out on March 7, 1986, in a talk called “You and Your Research.” The question on the table was why so few scientists do work that matters and so many are forgotten. His answer wasn’t brains. Stay deep in one problem, day after day after day, and your subconscious has nothing else to work on. Then one morning you wake up and the answer is there.

His instruction was to keep the subconscious starved, so it has to work on your problem and not somebody else’s.

That is not a claim about hours. Hamming said in the same talk that hard work pointed at the wrong thing gets you nowhere. Immersion is what your head does when you aren’t asking it to do anything. The shower. The drive. Three in the morning. Either the problem is in there or something else is.

It’s the same reason the empty hour matters. The gap is where the work gets done, if the work is what you left in it.

In February I wrote about multi-tabling: one person, many agents, many tables. Still true. But the agent does the typing. It will not do the soaking. You can have twenty tables running and be in none of them, approving diffs for a system you stopped carrying around in your head.

What’s left for the person is knowing which answer is the good one. No prompt gives you that. You get it by living inside the problem long enough that the wrong answer smells wrong.

Everybody has the same models. Nobody else has your months in it.

Stay in.

Source: You and Your Research, Richard Hamming, Bell Communications Research Colloquium, 7 March 1986 ↗