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Ray Kurzweil
Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence
Ray Kurzweil: I've always been rather relentless and managed to find a way to get the resources -- the hardest one of which is my own time -- to see ideas through. That's an important aspect of success. It's just not to recognize failure. I mean, failure is just sort of success deferred. It just means it's going to just take you a little bit longer. But where an idea becomes so real to you that it absolutely is real, even though it may not be real to anybody else, and then it's just a matter of carrying out this plan that has emerged in your head, and you work backwards from this vision, from this fantasy that becomes very real, and then imagine, well, okay, how can we work backwards? If that were to exist, what would have had to have happened? And then it lays out a path that you kind of work out in reverse, and then you just follow it. You have to be very, very persistent in doing that. But persistence towards a vision usually works. That's been my experience.
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Ray Kurzweil
Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence
Ray Kurzweil: Talent is really just one prerequisite to success. There's a lot of other factors. Certainly luck had something to do with it, and a lot of factors beyond our own efforts, in terms of having the right types of support and opportunities, and also picking the right problem. Einstein, after a few successes, picked a problem that we now know he was destined to fail at. So brilliantly pursuing a problem that you can't succeed in is -- it's pick the right problems at the right time. But most importantly, I think it's persistence, and we see again and again, whether it's in the political sphere or science, people who are really relentless about their mission -- and can see the end result even more real than what we consider concrete reality, and follow that mission with great confidence -- succeed. Very often people give up too quickly. They meet a few obstacles and think, "Oh well, that didn't work." But that confidence doesn't come from just sort of mindlessly plowing ahead. It really comes from being able to envision a reality that doesn't exist and seeing the benefit of it. So imagination is important.
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Eric Lander
Founding Director, Broad Institute
I now tell the story with a smile because it's all worked out just fine, and I look back and I laugh. But through all of these peregrinations, through different fields and random walks, I was very frequently depressed about all of it, and deeply worried about this. After all, world class math student, a Rhodes scholar, won thesis prizes in mathematics. I had a great career prospect to go ahead and do pure mathematics. I discarded all of that and I wasn't sure what for, and I recriminated often about that. I worried deeply about it, that I would never really have a good position in a university, or doing anything else for that matter. So anybody who imagines that you make these transitions without tremendous agonizing is absolutely wrong. I tell the story with a laugh today, but certainly it's a very painful thing to be searching around like that, and not knowing what you really want to do. Eventually, you make enough transitions that you realize that life is about making those transitions. I still doubt I made them very gracefully. I reckon I have a few more career changes left in me, and I don't imagine I'm going to do them completely gracefully. I hope, for the sake of my wife and my kids, I do them more gracefully than the ones I've done up to now, and worry maybe a little bit less, but you take these seriously. You throw yourself into them and they matter a lot, and somehow there's great internal turmoil as you reinvent yourself and find out what you really want to do. What you have to do is balance it with a lot of fun along the way, but I would certainly be wrong to say that the whole thing was easy. It certainly, I don't think, looks easy in retrospect, and it certainly wasn't easy. What I was very blessed by was wonderful people to do it with, and wonderful help.
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Meave Leakey
Pioneering Paleoanthropologist
Meave Leakey: In 1959, that was the year that -- they had been working intermittently at Olduvai since -- Louis's first trip was in 1931, and they had gone there together in 1935. So they'd gone back whenever they could find the time and the money. Louis was convinced that if they kept doing that, they would finally find really good evidence of human ancestors there, because the ground at Olduvai is covered in stone tools. There are stone tools everywhere. Louis felt that if they looked long enough, they would find the maker of the tools. It was from 1931 until 1959. In 1959, Mary Leakey spotted these teeth, which turned into a fantastic skull, which they nicknamed -- well, they called Zinjanthropus and nicknamed "dear boy." You can imagine them calling it "dear boy" after all that time. So this was a skull that really set the scene in East Africa, 'cause up until that time there had been no discoveries of anything other than what they had found at Olduvai, which was just isolated teeth and skull fragments.
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Meave Leakey
Pioneering Paleoanthropologist
Meave Leakey: It was in the ground in situ, but it was very cracked and broken, and it had roots going through it and it was covered in rock. It actually took one of the preparators in the museum, Christopher Chiari, nine months to get the rock off the skull, so it was nine months before we could really look at it and see what we had. So from the time of digging it out of the ground, we had to wait nine months before we could study it and then when we studied it we had to compare it with all sorts of other things. So that's why it wasn't actually published until 2001, in spite of being found in 1999.
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Meave Leakey
Pioneering Paleoanthropologist
Meave Leakey: Things have really changed, and dramatically changed I think. It's really encouraging now when I'm talking to students, in America particularly, that the student body is often more girls than men, young women than men. And it is, as you say, it's very quick. It's happened really quickly. I really wanted to do marine zoology, so I chose my university because there was a very good marine station there. I never dreamt I would be anything but a marine zoologist. It was straightforward as far as I could see. I went to a good school, got a good degree, and there you go. But when I started to apply for jobs, the answer was always negative, because I was a woman and they didn't have facilities (for women) on boats for men. You really can't do oceanography and marine zoology without going to sea. So it was just "No, no, no." Which is how I finally got into going to Africa and doing paleontology.
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