Richard Hamming on doing important work

Many of us know this feeling: years of work and growing skills, but nothing you can point to and say, “This is my work.”

I just read a summary of a 1986 lecture about it, by a scientist who worked alongside some of the best researchers of his time for decades. He noticed why smart people so often end up on work that doesn’t matter, and it isn’t brains or luck.

The lecture is Richard Hamming’s “You and Your Research.” He was a scientist at Bell Labs, where the people behind breakthroughs like the transistor, information theory and the laser worked.

He saw it firsthand: some people with ordinary IQs did great work, and some geniuses sank without a trace. The difference wasn’t brains. It came down to three things:

  • What they chose to work on
  • How seriously they went at it
  • How they managed themselves and their environment

Luck and compounding

On luck, he pushed back hard.

“Einstein was lucky to come up with relativity.” That’s what people say. But Hamming pointed out that Einstein made many breakthroughs, not just one. If it were only luck, it couldn’t keep happening.

Here’s the analogy. Picture lightning in a storm. Lightning strikes mountaintops more often than valleys. You can’t control the lightning, but you can choose whether to stand on the peak or hide down below.

“Luck favors the prepared mind.”

The most interesting part for me was about compound interest. Someone told Hamming about a colleague of his who was extremely productive: “You’d be surprised how much you’d know if you worked as hard as they did for years.”

The logic goes like this:

  • The more you know, the faster you learn.
  • The faster you learn, the more problems you can take on.
  • The more problems you take on, the more opportunities you can see.

A 10% difference in effort today becomes a huge difference in 10 years. It’s like saving: small but consistent, and over time it piles up.

Are you working on important problems?

This is his strongest point, and it made me uncomfortable.

“If you don’t work on important problems, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work.”

Hamming had three questions he’d ask people:

  1. “What are the most important problems in your field?”
  2. “Which of them are you working on?”
  3. And if the answer came back empty: “Then why are you working on something else?”

The whole room went quiet. The one person who could answer? Their career took off.

I tried asking myself. Honestly, I can’t answer with confidence yet either.

One of his habits I want to try is what he called “Great Thoughts Time.” Every Friday after lunch, he’d think only about big questions:

  • “Where is this field heading in the next 10 years?”
  • “What can I work on now that will be useful later?”
  • “What do I believe is important but haven’t touched yet?”

Why does this matter? Because without it, you can be extremely busy every day and still be heading the wrong way. Your feet keep walking, but you never ask, “Where does this road go?”

Good work has to be explained

One more thing technical people often forget: “It’s not enough to do good work. You have to be able to explain why it matters.”

Everyone’s busy. No one is sitting around waiting to discover your work. If your writing is hard to understand, or your presentations put people to sleep, they’ll skip it, no matter how good the content is.

Hamming said this is a skill you have to practice:

  • Writing clearly
  • Speaking in a way that connects
  • Explaining the context first, then the content

Work that can’t be explained is work that never gets valued.

Why smart people get stuck

And this is the most honest part. Why do so many smart people never do great work? According to Hamming:

  • They don’t work on important problems.
  • They aren’t obsessed enough, so their minds don’t keep working on it outside working hours.
  • They keep making excuses: “I didn’t have time,” “the system is difficult,” “I just had bad luck.”

What made me go quiet: I feel like I’ve done all three.

Hamming closed his lecture with this: “What’s valuable isn’t the result. It’s the struggle, the effort to make the most of what you’re capable of.”

You’re allowed to choose a relaxed life. That’s a legitimate choice. But be honest with yourself about which choice you’re actually making.

The full lecture is on YouTube as “Hamming, You and Your Research”. It’s only an hour, from 1986, but it feels like it was written for those of us living in 2026. It’s really worth studying.