Kudos to the webcomic SFP for putting this idea into words in the first place. Though I was highly skeptical of the premise based on title alone, I found the comic was actually not beating me with any kind of social justice stick and instead featured a flawed protagonist as confused as the rest of us. That is, this comic is less about Correct Morals and more about figuring them out – or realizing that there just isn’t a perfect solution – in the first place.

When I turned away from research, I told myself something along the lines of “I like learning things, but not discovering them”. So when I encountered the above panels, it struck me fairly hard. It’s easy to love the spark (the cool “did you know” fact); it’s hard to be the battery. I grew up on instant gratification and rewards for repeating things in fast feedback loops. But maybe my inclination towards trivia was just another manifestation of my own laziness.

You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode’s office and said, How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does? He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years. I simply slunk out of the office!

What Bode was saying was this: Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works 10% 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. I don’t want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode’s remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done.

-Richard Hamming, You and Your Research

And fundamentally, I feel like a pretty lazy person. I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if sloth were my greatest sin. It’s easy to put things off until tomorrow. It’s easy to just go with the flow and optimize for today. And it’s disgustingly easy for me to sit by and let life pass by. I rarely get the urge to stand up and do, or feel bad about a nonproductive day. On the other hand, it’s really, really hard for me to focus on a task and take the 10- or 5- or even 1-year view. Even though that’s a lot of time, I can’t – or don’t – make much of it.

I could view my teaching degree as a means to an end. As a path for getting money – hardly “get rich quick”, but a way to make a means for myself while contributing to the world in a nonnegative fashion. It would be easy to just slip into the bucket called “high school teacher”, and that’d be my life. It’d be easy for me to be satisfied with that path, too – there are a lot of reasonable justifications for it.

Or I could see my new degree as just a stepping stone, and truly work towards a bigger goal. I could strive for the stars and end up at the moon, instead of meekly sitting here, earthbound.

So…what do I do with my life? And how on earth do I focus my effort and attention for long enough to get there?