Letters to a Young Scientist by Edward O. Wilson

fields; and at least ten hours in research—presumably in the same field as your Ph.D. or postdoctoral work, or close enough to draw on the experience from your student years. Sixty hours a week total can be daunting, I know. So seize every opportunity to take sabbaticals and other paid leaves that allow you stretches of full-time research. Avoid department-level administration beyond thesis committee chairmanships if at all fair and possible. Make excuses, dodge, plead, trade. Spend extra time with students who show talent and interest in your field of research, then employ them as assistants for your benefit and theirs. Take weekends off for rest and diversion, but no vacations. Real scientists do not take vacations. They take field trips or temporary research fellowships in other institutions. Consider carefully job offers from other universities or research institutions that include more research time and fewer teaching and administrative responsibilities.
    Don’t feel guilty about following this advice. University faculties consist of both “inside professors,” who enjoy work that involves close social interactions with other faculty members and take justifiable pride in their service to the institution, and “outside professors,” whose social interactions are primarily with fellow researchers. Outside professors are light on committee work but earn their keep another way: they bring in a flow of new ideas and talent and they add prestige and income proportionate to the amount and quality of their discoveries.
    Wherever your research career takes you, whether into academia or otherwise, stay restless. If you are in an institution that encourages original research and rewards you for it, stay there. But continue to move about intellectually in search of new problems and new opportunities. Granted that happiness awaits those who can find pleasure while working on the same subject all their careers, and they assuredly have a good chance of making breakthrough advances while doing so. Polymer chemistry, computer programs of biological processes, butterflies of the Amazon, galactic maps, and Neolithic sites in Turkey are the kinds of subjects worthy of a lifetime of devotion. Once deeply engaged, a steady stream of small discoveries is guaranteed. But stay alert for the main chance that lies to the side. There will always be the possibility of a major strike, some wholly unexpected find, some little detail that catches your peripheral attention that might very well, if followed, enlarge or even transform the subject you have chosen. If you sense such a possibility, seize it. In science, gold fever is a good thing.
    To make such success more likely, there is another quality in which you might or might not be well endowed but if not should at least try to cultivate. It is entrepreneurship, the willingness to try something daunting you’ve imagined doing and no one else has thought or dared. It could be, for example, starting a project in a part of the world neither you nor your colleagues have yet visited; or finding a way to try an already available instrument or technique not yet used in your field; or, even more bravely, applying your knowledge to another discipline not yet exposed to it.
    Entrepreneurship is enhanced by performing lots of quick, easily performed experiments. Yes, that’s what I just said: experiments quick and easily performed. I know that the popular image of science is one of uncompromising precision, with each step carefully recorded in a notebook, along with periodic statistical tests on data made at regular intervals. Such is indeed absolutely necessary when the experiment is very expensive or time-consuming. It is equally demanded when a preliminary result is to be replicated and confirmed by you and others in order to bring a study to conclusion. But otherwise it is certainly all right and potentially very productive just to mess around. Quick uncontrolled experiments are very productive.