I've have been reading this book off and on for the past few months. A while back I read the book "How They Succeeded" (": The Secret to Success" or some such subtitle) by Orison Swett Marden (I would be remiss if I didn't say that I saw a review by someone saying, "The secret is in the author's middle name."). I wish to discuss this book a little bit, and then go on to a key point regarding the social lives I saw of a lot of the individuals involved in that book.
Basically, instead of reading a bunch of autobios and trying to find their secrets implicitly, it turns out this guy walked about and talked to these made and wrote a book that is exactly that.
Tl;dr, this book is cliff notes of many autobios summarized with the information _I_ want.
Tl;dr^2 this book is win.
Either way my notes follow and are not made in the normal fashion. This is because of the organization of the book being so different as to most other books I have read. Most other books have a few clear points and go about them in a linear fashion. This book is essentially a collection of interviews. So for a change of pace, I decided to just read through it and see what sticks. The idea being that, what sticks would be points common to most of these fairly successful people. I suppose I should also mention the people he interviews: basically everyone who was important in the U.S. in 1900. The author of "Battle Hymn of the Republic", Rockefeller, Carnegie, Edison, Wannamaker, and...really an impressive list. They all sat down with this guy and gave them their (as the author put it) "advice to young men".
I understand most of these points are trite, but either way I will state them as they had been stated.
Without further ado about nothing (with a tl;dr^2 afterwards bottom):
-Perseverance. I do not think there was a single person in this vast, vast list that did not mention this. Even if Orison did not bring it up intentionally in the interview, this trait would always, always come up. And there was a great amount of attention with everyone to also include a remark disparaging that their success was by chance. Some said that perseverance simple made them ready for the chances that appeared.
--Really, ALL OF THEM said this. Keep in mind, that's about thirty some odd rich authors/musicians/scientists/
-Work hard.
-Do one thing. Particularly, in what you're good at. There's a lot of examples of people who persevere, but in many thing. There was also an implicit lesson in that even if the one thing you specialized in becomes obsolete, it either: isn't _really_ obsolete and there are a lot of opportunities still available in the area especially since many people will become discouraged, or you pull an "animal husbandry" trick (this is a joke from D&D, supposedly a player put all of his ranks into animal husbandry and was able to get out of every possible situation by clever use or interpretation of what the skill meant) and realize that the large tent of skills your specialization provides or areas it allows access into that may not yet be obsolete or even new.
-Accounting. Surprisingly, a lot of the great businessmen always talk about some connection or want of first-class [mark the adjective] bookkeepers. Most either started off as clerks or bookkeepers or really understand the importance of them. Rockefeller was fond enough of it that he kept his first ledger as Scrooge McDuck kept his Number One Dime, that is, even though it was full he kept it with him.
-----I would be remiss if I did not put a small remark of how I think this backs up my thoughts of the importance of logging here...
-Of all the individuals that highly valued education, they did not start off with free education or being given scholarships into schools. They started off as child laborers. In fact, there was one individual who started off with an enormous amount of opportunity (as his father was rich); but he sucked at school and kept flunking all over the place. Then only when his father kicked him out and he started working did he recognize the values of certain kinds of education. Actually, his story is not alone in the book...
--But, just like perseverance above, they all mention "study".
-There's a crapload of religious people, and almost all the businessmen speak of philanthropy (even in small amounts) heavily. Honestly, it seems more like they use religion and philanthropy as a means for business connections and cheap advertisement.
Tl;dr^2:
-Keep at it.
-Work Hard.
-Study.
-One Thing.
-Logging.
-Accounting.
-Applying social reinforcement beneficially is easy.
That last one I want to expound on.
Go check out Hamming's article "You and Your Research". I want to focus on the 'closed v. open doors' part of that speech for a little bit before going into another example.
Perhaps the closed v open doors thing that Hamming talked about wasn't just about efficacy in individuals' research. There seems to be this positive reinforcement coupled to the social aspects of talking about mathematics to others.
Conferences -> Social reinforcement coupled to math -> More math
I remembered someone asking me whether I got social needs/crap from talking about math randomly to people in the department. I answered "NO" out of a sense of wanting to appear tough (perhaps? I don't know). But now, knowing what I know about behaviorism, I am not so sure...maybe I do? Maybe this is the reason that math people do math? And they appear anti-social because they only stick with people who talk about math, which by definition is not the majority? I'm just brainstorming thoughts here...YOU MIGHT NOTICE THIS BECAUSE OF THE PROPENSITY OF THE QUESTION MARKS.
I mean, my other thoughts are:
-Again, as above in "How They Succeeded", a lot of the people either blatantly suggested talking about your goals and plans with as many people as possible, or implicitly suggested this (by showing in their own lifes how doing this positively reinforced their actions).
-At least when I talk about the problems I'm thinking about, I'm typically actively solving items in front of the person I'm talking to.
-If not, they're talking about things that I put in juxtaposition to what I'm talking about, and lets me think continuously more creatively than by myself.
-It's really cheap, easy, and passive positive reinforcement (the holy grail of reinforcement strategies).
Perhaps mathematicians aren't anti-social, it's just that the things they talk about can not be conversed with the typical person in public on a useful or reinforcing level so that to outsiders they appear anti-social, but to their clique they are not.
For what it's worth, this is also backed up in a lot of the biographies in found in E.T. Bell's Men of Mathematics. When they were not in isolation, LETTERS EVERYWHERE. OHDEARLORD SO MUCH CORRESPONDENCE (I WARNED YOU BRO, I WARNED YOU ABOUT THE CORRESPONDENCE!). MATH WAS DONE EVERYWHERE. Again, I'm going to emphasize this, and I doublechecked it. If you look at a lot of mathematician's collected works (I looked at Jacobi's in particular), a vast majority is correspondence. Even Archimedes had a lot of correspondence (it's surprising that it was able to last so long through history). Also, whenever conversation strayed from maths, apparently Lagrange started spewing "I don't know" every three seconds. Furthermore, the only exception to this is Galois. I used to think his life story was "Oh I have an idea! Oh hey girls! Oh hey I'mma gonna die because of girl-feuds! Oh hey last thesis I just did in a day kthxbai!" Whereas his life was CONTINUALLY TRYING TO GET INTO THE MATH CLUB and the math club being all "wtfno" EVERY SINGLE TIME. But then again, I'm not sure how much of an exception this is, since Galois didn't do any other maths other than his one sketch of an idea.
It just occurred to me, aside from possibly the Mersenne circle, the majority of social reinforcement was _correspondence_. E.g., letters. Thus, this gives me the idea that instead of going down a few floors each time I have an idea in X, I could just _WRITE A ****ING LETTER_.
....if I could find more people than myself, my advisor and the one (or two) other person (people?) in my department who know anything about my field :|...
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