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The question

Which thinking habit do you wish you could break?

Originally asked

Vox, to writers and thinkers, 9 Questions, 2017

Vox's fixed 9 Questions format asks this verbatim across respondents.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Structural biologist; Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 2009

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here
Often, what happens in science is you got a problem and you solve it, and then there’s not much else to do and you have to move on. But the ribosome turned out to be a rather rich gold mine. Perhaps I’m a little intellectually lazy and feel like, “Why should I bother thinking about something else?” Maybe at some point, I should have thought, “I should do something different.”

Academy of Achievement interview source ↗

Others on this question

View all 21 →
Whitney Cummings Comedian and writer; co-creator of 2 Broke Girls
Overthinking. I tend to conflate the amount of time spent on something with how good it is. Sometimes intuition is better than proof, and gut instinct better than hours of “work.”
Recorded Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 15 April 2017 source ↗
Henry Rollins Musician, writer and broadcaster
Rushing to judgment. Looking for the bad in someone else before anything else.
Recorded Sean Illing, Vox, "9 questions" series, 8 April 2017 source ↗
Mark Cuban Entrepreneur and investor; owner of the Dallas Mavericks
I’ll get half way through a book and then jump to another.
Recorded Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 13 May 2017 source ↗

More from Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

View profile →
Question How has a setback or failure set you up for later success? Failure & regret
Well, I'll be honest with you. I was a theoretical physicist but my Ph.D. work was on a problem that was not particularly interesting to me at the time. And I used to subscribe to Scientific American and I found that there were all these wonderful discoveries happening in biology and I also knew that a number of physicists had gone into biology and been successful. So, I decided to switch.
Recorded Adam Smith, Telephone interview recorded minutes after the prize announcement, Nobel Prize Outreach, 7 October 2009 source ↗
Question What is one of the best investments you have made — of money, time, or energy? Money & investment
No, because I started working on ribosomes when I was a post doc, in 1978, when it would have been impossible, really, to solve it. But, it was just a fundamental problem in biology. And we felt, no matter, anything we do to chip away at the problem would be useful. So it was more that that attracted me. And I think the fact that it was large and kind of difficult to come to grips with, yes, it was attractive. Really what was attractive was that it was a fundamental problem.
Recorded Adam Smith, Telephone interview recorded minutes after the prize announcement, Nobel Prize Outreach, 7 October 2009 source ↗

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