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.
Certain governments are suggesting that bloggers and tweeters aren't 'real' writers and, so, don't merit protection. A writer is anyone from a Nobel laureate to a debut blogger. They all get PEN's attention.
For any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers; besides, even the productions that are only addressed to the imagination, raise the reader a little above the gross gratification of appetites, to which the mind has not given a shade of delicacy.
The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.
Anyone who stops learning is old β whether this happens at twenty or at eighty. Anyone who keeps on learning not only remains young but becomes constantly more valuable β regardless of physical capacity.
My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets β no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!
The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid.
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