If you read all the time what other people have done, you will the think the way they thought.
Interpretation
Reading others' work influences your own thinking and creativity.
This quote by Richard Hamming emphasizes the importance of original thought and creativity. By constantly consuming the ideas and works of others, individuals may unconsciously adopt those perspectives and limit their own unique contributions. Hamming warns against becoming a mere reflection of others' ideas, advocating instead for independent thinking and the generation of original thoughts.
In practice
During a workshop on innovation, I shared this quote to encourage participants to think outside the box.
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.
If you don't work on important problems, it's not likely that you'll do important work.
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.
The librarian's mission should be, not like up to now, a mere handling of the book as an object, but rather a know how (mise au point) of the book as a vital function.
To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others.
However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.
There is no cost difference between incarceration and an Ivy League education; the main difference is curriculum.
For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.
The higher education system in these countries (US, Korea etc) has become like a theatre in which some people decided to stand to get a better view, promoting the others behind them to stand. Once enough people stand, everyone has to stand, which means no one is getting a better view, while everyone has become more uncomfortable.
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