“Why Greatness Cannot be Planned”
the hard truth of how to succeed in academia and startup without killing yourself
The self-help book industry is a strange business, with models and methods which are often not so reproducible in practice, at the point I would consider it relatively a waste of money.
Among what I would consider a bit more scientific books on success, I particularly liked “Serendipidy” by Telmo Pievani, and “The Fomula” of Albert László Barabási. The first highlights that there is indeed a luck component in success in science and technology (although if you do nothing, lack will not meet you), and the second one highlights the importance of networking to break from average to well-known as a more critical aspect than hard-working or being smart.
I have read an even more brutal book on the topic “Why Greatness Cannot be Planned” by Joel Lehman and Kenneth Stanley. The tone is still kind of self-help though it is thruogh a computer science research exposition. In fact, it is published by Springer Verlag, which is typical academic publisher.
Joel Lehman is a researcher in computational evolution and artificial life, subfields of machine learning. Kenneth O. O. Stanley is also a researcher in aritificial intelligence and currently the research manager of OpenAI. Don’t worry the book is not about AI and its hype. It is more on how…
