Each of these men felt secretly - it was his very special secret and his deepest secret - that he could be great.īut not many undergraduates come through our present educational system retaining this hope. I know that each of the undergraduates with whom I talked shares this belief. I believe that men are born this way - that all men are born this way. The scientist comes to the world and says, "I do not understand the divine source, but I know, in a way that I don't understand, that out of chaos I can make order, out of loneliness I can make friendship, out of ugliness I can make beauty." The great contribution of science is to demonstrate that a person can regard the world as chaos, but can find in himself a method of perceiving, within that chaos, small arrangements of order, that out of himself, and out of the order that previous scientists have generated, he can make things that are exciting and thrilling to make, that are deeply spiritual contributions to himself and to his friends. The great contribution of science is to say that this second theory is nonsense. Either you believe that this kind of individual greatness does exist and can be nurtured and developed, that such great individuals can be part of a cooperative community while they continue to be their happy, flourishing, contributing selves - or else you believe that there is some mystical, cyclical, overriding, predetermined, cultural law - a historic determinism. He even considered titling it What Came Out of a Bottle of Ink, but eventually settled for the less abstract and insidery title.Context: I believe there are two opposing theories of history, and you have to make your choice. He finished the book weeks before deadline, using up the whole bottle of ink to write it. It served as his uniform for many months. He had purchased the knitted outfit, which reached right down to his toes, just for the occasion. Hugo locked away his clothes to avoid any temptation of going outside and was left with nothing to wear except a large gray shawl. He bought an entire bottle of ink in preparation and practically put himself under house arrest for months, using a most peculiar anti-escape technique: In the fall of 1830, Victor Hugo set out to write The Hunchback of Notre Dame against the seemingly impossible deadline of February 1831. “Even more curious were the resourceful methods authors used to compel themselves to execute their daily quotas. The detail of working “eighteen straight days without changing his clothes” reminded me of the author Victor Hugo. ( Hat tip to Steve for bringing this quote to my attention.) I like these stories because they underscores an important point that has been increasingly overlooked in an age that lauds open offices and social media-enabled serendipity: creativity is 99% hard, deep work. Land’s wikipedia entry notes that he was known for his “marathon research sessions,” elaborating: “When Land conceived of an idea, he would experiment and brainstorm until the problem was solved with no breaks of any kind.”įamously, while researching polarized films, Land once went eighteen days without changing his clothes. “If anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing to excess … My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn’t know they had.” Here he is in a 1975 interview with Forbes magazine talking about his approach to innovation: What interests me most about Land, however, was his work habits. “What was Land like?…He was a true visionary,” is how his friend Elkan Bout described him. Study Hacks Blog Edwin Land’s Deep Research May 12th, 2016 Įdwin Land is famous for co-founding the Polaroid Corporation, but he’s also known as one of the twentieth century’s most innovative inventors. In addition to his famed work on instant film development, his research on polarizing filters led to many breakthroughs.
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