Mark Geller

In an interview with Joe Armstrong in “Coders At Work,” the excellent book I described in a recent post, the author Peter Seibel refers to a famous talk by Richard Hamming entitled “You and Your Research” in which Hamming advises young scientists on how to do great work, make significant contributions to their fields, and achieve career success. Hamming addresses numerous issues that are relevant for anyone who wants to make their mark and achieve success, certainly including entrepreneurs. I will go into only one of these points in detail here, although I would advise anyone and everyone to take a few minutes and at least skim through the transcript of the talk. In particular, his comments on why most major contributions to theoretical math and physics are made by researchers early in their 20’s and 30’s are fascinating.

The concept I want to mention today is the point made by Armstrong in paraphrasing Hamming, i.e., the compounding benefits of learning steadily applied over time. In Armstrong’s words:

“…And Hamming said, ‘I always spend a day a week learning new stuff. That means I spend 20 percent more of my time than my colleagues learning new stuff. Now 20 percent at compound interest means that after four and a half years I will know twice as much as them. And because of compound interest, this 20 percent extra, one day a week, after five years, I will know three times as much,’ or whatever the figures are…. You were asking earlier what should one do to become a better programmer? Spend 20 percent of your time learning stuff–because it’s compounded. Read Hamming’s paper. It’s good. Very good.”

Anyone who has worked with senior developers or others who have devoted time consistently throughout their careers to growing their knowledge and skill-set has experienced this firsthand.

This has numerous implications for entrepreneurs as well as all of us as individuals. Imagine if your company can spend even 10% more time innovating than your competition, let alone 20%–after 5 years you could be not 40-50% ahead of your competition but 2-3 times! After 10 years the gap would be insurmountable. Google obviously recognizes this, as enabling developers to constantly learn is one of the main motivations of the well-known “20% time” that encourages all developers to spend one day a week working on any project related to Google’s business that interests them. (As a side note, one of the other excellent perks of working at Google that gets less publicity than 20% time is the fact that EVERY WEEK Google brings in anywhere from 5 to 20 speakers to present on topics ranging from highly technical issues to new books on environmentalism, cooking, and politics, which are broadcast live to Google offices around the world. Overall this contributes to a stimulating intellectual environment that is highly conducive to continuous learning.)

As individuals, it says it is critical we continue to learn and expand our skill-sets. (For entrepreneurs, this could also include improving business networking and presentation skills, which I believe also accrue exponentially.) For example, for me this week on the technical side for a consulting project I learned the basic process for base64 encoding/decoding used to send files as email attachments, and for KlickFu I am now starting to learn some basic C++. Of course, C++ is a large, complex language and I may never become even an intermediate coder in it. However, what I have already learned in terms of the benefits of object-oriented programming and the basics of how programs are compiled has been eye-opening and better prepared me to understand the structure of the KlickFu application. My ultimate goal is to be able to read and comprehend the KlickFu source code and prototype apps directly in C++. I believe this will pay dividends for improving KlickFu as well as other projects.

To quote Albert Einstein: “The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.” My $0.02 is to take this to heart and strive to devote 10-20% of your and your company’s time to learning. Best of luck to you and your research.