I am sure at this point that everyone is getting a little tired of me talking about Richard Hamming’s “You and Your Research” but there are just so many good points to the talk that I feel like I must share. At one point, Hamming recounts complaining to Hendrik Bode about one of Hamming’s coworkers being so much smarter than he:
[Bode replied] “You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.” What Bode was saying was this: “Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice out-produce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity! [I]t is very much like compound interest … given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.
Fundamentally, this is why I spend so much time reading and studying so many different subjects. As I gather information, I form more connections between the topics in my brain. This is a variation on Metcalfe’s Law, which derives the value of a network as approaching the square of the number of nodes in a network as the number of nodes gets large — specifically:
Consider the classical example of a fax machine. A single fax machine is not very useful on its own. Add a second fax machine to the network and suddenly the machines can talk to each other with a single connection. Add a third and you have three connections. A fourth gives you a total of six connections, and so on and so on.
Now you can see the value in thinking that one more hour a day. By thinking one more hour, you can learn one more thing. However, that one thing can possibly be combined with every thing else you have learned in new and interesting ways. This also goes back to the classical education movement and the trivium that I discussed a few weeks ago. As you gain more and more information in the grammar stage of learning — about any topic — you can build more connections between the information and make more reasoned arguments during the logic and rhetoric stages of learning.
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