He points to thinking about the important problems as causing success. When people change what they are doing, then they don’t continue to have it:
In the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work.
Carrying on from the end of your section:
When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn’t the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren’t good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.
The talk is about things that cause people to do great work. When those causal factors change, the work output also changes. He goes on to cover other things which are about professional success:
Working with an open office door, to talk to your coworkers
Changing routine work into more general and important work, which is more satisfying
The importance of self-promotion
Working on presentation skills
How to recruit your boss to fight with outside agencies
How to get your boss to give you more resources
Dressing for success, and getting punished for non-conformity
Lastly, he is pretty specific about his motivations (emphasis mine):
I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.
So he is specifically talking about professional success in science. But—things like the rationality project and EA are good candidates for other fields to which the advice could be applied, especially in light of how important science is to them.
I read this section completely differently.
He points to thinking about the important problems as causing success. When people change what they are doing, then they don’t continue to have it:
Carrying on from the end of your section:
The talk is about things that cause people to do great work. When those causal factors change, the work output also changes. He goes on to cover other things which are about professional success:
Working with an open office door, to talk to your coworkers
Changing routine work into more general and important work, which is more satisfying
The importance of self-promotion
Working on presentation skills
How to recruit your boss to fight with outside agencies
How to get your boss to give you more resources
Dressing for success, and getting punished for non-conformity
Lastly, he is pretty specific about his motivations (emphasis mine):
So he is specifically talking about professional success in science. But—things like the rationality project and EA are good candidates for other fields to which the advice could be applied, especially in light of how important science is to them.