You and Your Research
TL;DR — Hamming’s 1986 Bell Labs talk on why capable people mostly do not do important work — sixteen pages, and unusually blunt about it.
A transcript of a colloquium talk at Bell Communications Research, 1986.
Hamming’s question is not how to be smart but why so many demonstrably smart colleagues never did first-rate work. His answers are uncomfortable and specific: working on important problems requires first admitting which problems are important, which most people avoid because it obliges them to notice they are not working on one; open doors produce more interruptions and far more results than closed ones; and compound interest applies to effort, so small consistent advantages dominate.
Sixteen pages, no hedging, and it has aged better than almost anything else in the genre.
Where this came from
16 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.