Continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow

Sharif Shameem talks about the disadvantages of success and how willingness to look stupid helps countering it.

There’s this unfortunate pattern that happens when someone wins a Nobel Prize. They tend to stop doing great work. Richard Hamming talks about this in You and Your Research:

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.

Before the Nobel Prize, nobody really cares who you are. But after the Nobel Prize, you’re a Nobel Prize winner, and Nobel Prize winners are supposed to have Good Ideas. Every idea, every paper, every talk at a conference is now being evaluated against the standard of your Nobel Prize-winning work. Everyone is asking, “is this worthy of a Nobel laureate?” It’s a high bar to clear. So instead of trying and occasionally failing, they just… stop trying. The fear of making something bad is worse than producing nothing at all.

This reminds me of Quality vs Quantity.