When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did 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. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after.
What is something everyone in your world agrees about that you think is wrong?
Question
In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to?
Daily life
Question
What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore?
Time & hindsight
Perhaps we should give athletes the right to take a mental break from media scrutiny on a rare occasion without being subject to strict sanctions. In any other line of work, you would be forgiven for taking a personal day here and there, so long as it's not habitual.
First-person cover essay, Time, 8 July 2021 source ↗
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Richard Hamming
Mathematician and computer scientist; Turing Award, 1968
Recorded
Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar, Morristown, New Jersey, Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar (transcription hosted by the University of Virginia Department of Computer Science), 7 March 1986
source ↗
Bill Clinton
42nd President of the United States, 1993–2001
If I had to make the welfare decision again tomorrow, I’d sign it again tomorrow. We had a 60 percent reduction in the welfare rolls. We had an enormous percentage of poor people move into the workforce, start middle-class lifestyles, and when we had a brief tech recession of six months in 2001, after I left office, people who had moved from welfare to work were less likely to be laid off than the general working population. So I would do it again.
John C. Bogle
Founder of The Vanguard Group, 1974
Over the past two centuries, our nation has moved from being an agricultural economy, to a manufacturing economy, to a service economy, and now to a predominantly financial economy. But our financial economy, by definition, subtracts from the value created by our productive businesses. Think about it: while the owners of business enjoy the dividend yields and earnings growth that our capitalistic system creates, those who play in the financial markets capture those investment gains only after the costs of financial intermediation are deducted. Thus, while investing in American business is a winner's game, beating the stock market before those costs is a zero-sum game. But after intermediation costs are deducted, beating the market—for all of us as a group—becomes a loser's game.
Recorded
Georgetown University commencement, Georgetown University / johncbogle.com, 18 May 2007
source ↗
Steve Jobs
Co-founder and chief executive of Apple; co-founder of NeXT; chief executive of Pixar
Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked.
More from Naomi Osaka
View profile →I communicated that I wanted to skip press conferences at Roland Garros to exercise self-care and preservation of my mental health. I stand by that. Athletes are humans.
I feel uncomfortable being the spokesperson or face of athlete mental health as it's still so new to me and I don't have all the answers. I do hope that people can relate and understand it's O.K. to not be O.K., and it's O.K. to talk about it. There are people who can help, and there is usually light at the end of any tunnel.
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