From Hamming's "You and Your Research":
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 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. 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. I don't like
to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect
her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect
things if you intend to get what you want done. There's
no question about this.
http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229067
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=852405
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915515
http://searchyc.com/you+and+your+research+hamming?sort=by_da...
Unsurprisingly, it's all over the 'net:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22You+and+your+research%22...