A Stroke of Genius: Striving for Greatness in All You Do (1993)
I dislike this.  I almost hate it, but it at least raises interesting questions.<p>The reasoning is almost entirely post-hoc.  He observes many successful people and their similarities and then claims "I have now told you how to succeed." p(success | trait) != p(trait | success).  Hindsight bias is at play.<p>He makes other weird statements: "you are automatically condemned to waste the rest of your life (see Einstein above)."  Mr. Hamming is a difficult guy to please.<p>Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied many successful individuals in a systematic way and acknowledged the inherent problems with this approach.  Read his book instead of this: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Flow-Psychology-Discovery-Invention/dp/0062283251" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Flow-Psychology-Discovery-...</a><p>Finally: "Those who have done really great things generally report, privately, that it is better than wine, the opposite sex, and song put together."<p>This is strongly contradicted by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's evidence.  Nearly everyone he talked to (many Nobel Laureates among them) said their greatest achievement was raising a family or something in personal life.  I can't claim this generalizes, but I can provide it as a stark counterexample to Hamming's claim.