Strominger had an illustrious career and seminal achievements to his credit in his long tenure at Harvard and still wants to pursue science and work on hard problems.

This is what he says:

“Some people like to play chess; some people like to play bingo; and some like to watch TV; they’re all games. Science is a more complicated game. You have to pull information from various sources. That’s the game I like to play.”

Work

Over his long career, Strominger has authored nearly 1,000 papers and earned about 30 prestigious awards, including many honorary degrees. But he’s especially proud of what he calls his “legacy”: more than 200 students who have become prominent scientists, among them 12 Harvard professors, 12 National Academy of Sciences members, and two Nobel laureates.

“He was working on bacterial cell walls when I joined his lab and was just starting to work on the immune system,” said Springer. “He has always been driven to want to make discoveries, to do important things, and he urged me to work on important scientific problems. But he was also a real mensch, always interested in my personal life.”

Strominger’s scientific excitement has been a constant in his life, said his son, Andrew Strominger, the Gwill E. York Professor of Physics. “I remember as a kid how happy and excited he was about his work,” he said. “When it comes to his work, he peps up and gets excited even now.”

“I have never worked alone,” said Strominger. “I’ve always had good people to work with since the beginning. Looking at the lists of those scientists who worked in my lab cheers me up.”

Asked what advice he has for young scientists, Strominger highlighted the importance of choosing a problem to solve. “Science is a great thing to do,” he said. “Think carefully about what you want to work on, get advice, and work hard. It’s fun, much better than chess.”

Oh, they’d say, and then after a pause to digest this revelation, they’d ask: What makes a startup a good investment?

So I would explain that what makes a startup promising, not just in the eyes of investors but in fact, is growth. Ideally in revenue, but failing that in usage. What they needed to do was get lots of users.

How does one get lots of users? They had all kinds of ideas about that. They needed to do a big launch that would get them “exposure.” They needed influential people to talk about them. They even knew they needed to launch on a tuesday, because that’s when one gets the most attention.

No, I would explain, that is not how to get lots of users. The way you get lots of users is to make the product really great. Then people will not only use it but recommend it to their friends, so your growth will be exponential once you get it started.

At this point I’ve told the founders something you’d think would be completely obvious: that they should make a good company by making a good product. And yet their reaction would be something like the reaction many physicists must have had when they first heard about the theory of relativity: a mixture of astonishment at its apparent genius, combined with a suspicion that anything so weird couldn’t possibly be right. Ok, they would say, dutifully. And could you introduce us to such-and-such influential person? And remember, we want to launch on Tuesday.

It would sometimes take founders years to grasp these simple lessons. And not because they were lazy or stupid. They just seemed blind to what was right in front of them.

• Paul Graham source

When discussing technologies to support learning and education, my mentor Seymour Papert often emphasized the importance of “low floors” and “high ceilings.” For a technology to be effective, he said, it should provide easy ways for novices to get started (low floor) but also ways for them to work on increasingly sophisticated projects over time (high ceiling).

For a more complete picture, we need to add an extra dimension: wide walls. It’s not enough to provide a single path from low floor to high ceiling; we need to provide wide walls so that kids can explore multiple pathways from floor to ceiling.

— Mitchel Resnick

This gives us a lens through which evaluate tools:

• Low floor: how easy is it to learn?
• Wide walls: how inclusive is it? How many different use-cases does it serve?
• High ceiling: does it scale with growth?

Most programming tools focus exclusively on creating a high ceiling. By choosing the other two neglected dimensions, Scratch has carved out a durable niche for itself. It is widely used in intro-to-programming courses, beginner robotics, after-school classes… any place a simple but open-ended programming model is needed.

How can your product focus on:

Lowering the floor — becoming simpler, cheaper, “good enough” Widening the walls — serving an ignored audience or market

Source: http://gordonbrander.com/pattern/low-floor-wide-walls-high-ceiling/