I took a number of things from The Art of Doing Science and Engineering (work on problems for which you have at least a clue where to start; aim your career in at least a vague direction and it will go father than if you just follow your nose), but one of these things was so staggering that it put all the others in the shade:
If you aren't working on the most important problems in your field, what are you doing?
Hamming illustrates with this anecdote:
I had been eating for some years with the Physics table at the Bell Telephone Laboratories restaurant...Fame, promotion and hiring by other companies ruined the average quality of the people so I shifted to the Chemistry table in another corner of the restaurant. I began by asking what the important problems were in chemistry, then later what important problems they were working on, and finally one day said, "If what you are working on is not important and not likely to lead to important things, then why are you working on it?" After that, I was not welcome and had to shift to eating with the Engineers.
I've actually read this story before. A decade ago, I read Hamming’s talk, You and Your Research, which includes this story. But when I read it back then, the effect on me was zero. Now, it has genuinely changed the direction of my work.
For the last year, I've been going on long walks and sorting through ideas around making software authoring tools that prioritize one of these three things:
Hamming's book made me realize: these are important problems. I expect I bounced off the idea of working on the most important problems years ago when I considered what some important problems might be and didn't have a clue where to start. Now, because of working at Airtable and walking and learning about other attempts at similar things and learning more about the history of interactive computing, I do have a clue where to start.
Part of Mary Rose Cook’s research to build software quickly