You and your research

This is a famous essay by Richard Feynman, and I particularly recommend reading it at least once whether you are a student, work in tech, a startup, or a company, create things, or just want to notice (or answer) the question of what differentiates you in doing great work in your field. After reading it several times over a while, here are some highlights I want to keep and that I think are worth reading. Below is the full article, which I cannot stop to reccomend.

Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You're not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance.
The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not.
Yes, it is partly luck, and partly it is the prepared mind; but 'partly' is the other thing I'm going to talk about.
One of the characteristics you see, and many people have it including great scientists, is that usually when they were young they had independent thoughts and had the courage to pursue them.
Once he got well started, his shyness, his awkwardness, his inarticulateness, fell away and he became much more productive in many other ways. Certainly he became much more articulate.
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.
If you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work.
But in a few weeks I saw it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems.
People are often most productive when working conditions are bad.
I could go to the West Coast and get a job with the airplane companies without any trouble, but the exciting people were at Bell Labs and the fellows out there in the airplane companies were not.
"Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest." Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity — it is very much like compound interest.
That's the trouble; drive, misapplied, doesn't get you anywhere.
Just hard work is not enough — it must be applied sensibly.
Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started.
Most great scientists are completely committed to their problem. Those who don't become committed seldom produce outstanding, first-class work.
But one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious.
Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.
"If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring.
They were unable to ask themselves, "What are the important problems in my field?" If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.
The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems.
You can't always know exactly where to be, but you can keep active in places where something might happen.
It's that simple. If you want to do great work, you clearly must work on important problems, and you should have an idea.
We didn't get around to reducing it because we were building some more equipment, but if we had reduced that data we would have found fission.
Now of course lots of times it doesn't work out, but you don't have to hit many of them to do some great science.
Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, "The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind." I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder.
I wasn't happy; I was depressed. I could see life being a long sequence of one problem after another after another. After quite a while of thinking I decided, "No, I should be in the mass production of a variable product. I should be concerned with all of next year's problems, not just the one in front of my face."
"It is a poor workman who blames his tools — the good man gets on with the job, given what he's got, and gets the best answer he can."
Everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well that they will set aside what they are doing, look at what you've done, read it, and come back and say, "Yes, that was good."
You have to learn to write clearly and well so that people will read it, you must learn to give reasonably formal talks, and you also must learn to give informal talks.
Most of the time the audience wants a broad general talk and wants much more survey and background than the speaker is willing to give. As a result, many talks are ineffective.
"Luck favors the prepared mind."
You can educate your bosses. It's a hard job. In this talk I'm only viewing from the bottom up; I'm not viewing from the top down.
I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.
Why is it so? What happened to them? Why do so many of the people who have great promise, fail?
Well, one of the reasons is drive and commitment. The people who do great work with less ability but who are committed to it, get more done than those who have great skill and dabble in it, who work during the day and go home and do other things and come back and work the next day.
You find this happening again and again; good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system and take advantage of all the system has to offer.
It takes patience.
If you want to do something, don't ask, do it. Present him with an accomplished fact.
You should dress according to the expectations of the audience spoken to.
It was a payoff for the times I had made an effort to cheer her up, tell her jokes and be friendly; it was that little extra work that later paid off for me.
Be clear, when you fight the system and struggle with it, what you are doing, how far to go out of amusement, and how much to waste your effort fighting the system.
Another thing you should look for is the positive side of things instead of the negative. I have already given you several examples, and there are many, many more; how, given the situation, by changing the way I looked at it, I converted what was apparently a defect to an asset.
"Well, I had the idea but I didn't do it and so on and so on." There are so many alibis. Why weren't you first? Why didn't you do it right? Don't try an alibi. Don't try and kid yourself. You can tell other people all the alibis you want. I don't mind. But to yourself try to be honest.
I have since gone off to the Naval Postgraduate School and laid back somewhat, and now my health is much better. But if you want to be a great scientist you're going to have to put up with stress. You can lead a nice life; you can be a nice guy or you can be a great scientist. But nice guys end last.
When you talk to other people, you want to get rid of those sound absorbers who are nice people but merely say, "Oh yes," and to find those who will stimulate you right back.
They are just nice guys; they fill the whole space and they contribute nothing except they absorb ideas and the new ideas just die away instead of echoing on.
If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought.
You need to keep up more to find out what the problems are than to read to find the solutions. The reading is necessary to know what is going on and what is possible.