It only takes one: Do less, think more

Sauvik Das
6 min readMay 6, 2021

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The most impactful people are often defined by one great idea.

Einstein, for example, had a long career but is known especially for relativity. Marie Curie for radioactivity. Herb Simon for bounded rationality.

Some people are especially famous for being prolific, of course — e.g., Paul Erdos — but I find conversations about these people often tend to focus more on how stellar it was that they published so much, rather than what they published about.

The names I just mentioned are all intellectual giants in their fields [1], but the concept applies at more modest levels of professional accomplishment as well. When considering which Ph.D. students to admit, for example, I find myself more drawn to the people who have done one truly excellent thing than many pretty good things.

In other words, the culture of producing as-much-as-possible is not only bad for mental health (contributing to record high levels of burnout, anxiety, &c.), it is also counter-productive. So, yes, this is just another: “do less, but better” post — but it’s not as simple as all that in practice, is it?

The false dichotomy between quality and quantity: Doing better requires doing more

I’ve written before about the folly of measuring academic impact through count statistics, and…

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Sauvik Das

Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. Formerly at Georgia Tech. Ph.D. from CMU HCII. HCI, Security, Data Science.