This article should only be useful to those burdened by the compulsion to high achievement. For better of worse, I’m one of them.

If you’re trying to do really great work (in the Hamming or Graham sense), you’re probably going to do things in a different way. This will create the situation where your work might not be valued as highly as you think it should be.

Now, if you’re doing great work from the perspective of minimizing your death bed regret and maximizing your potential, recognition is not only irrelevant, it can also be harmful. If you become eminent, your freedom to fail will be curtailed (by your own perceived need to maintain your eminence) and you will be bothered/delighted with (possibly fun) requests on your time.

Taking a wild and extreme perspective of potential maximization, if you can bear (or even thrive) on lack of recognition, the less of it (or the later it arrives), the better. This, of course, assumes that you can have a lifestyle that is conducive to doing your best work. If some recognition is necessary for this, then by all means go get it somehow.

What is essential (I think) is to obtain validation that you are in the right path. Some of it will come from the actual work itself, but some also needs to come from other practitioners in the field. If you have zero validation from other practitioners, there is the distinct risk that you are truly lost and your work will be ultimately worthless for others, even in the distant future.

If you can validate your assumptions, or question standard assumptions without receiving satisfying answers, from top practitioners in the field, that is already solid validation of your path. This can also be done by analogy, by looking at other trailblazers in related disciplines and learning from their process of questioning assumptions. In any case, some human feedback is necessary to validate that your trailblazing is not tracing a path to nowhere.

This is to me an open problem, but from now on I’m experimenting with the mantra: seek validation, not recognition.