Being effective

How do you do effective research (or any job) and how do you publicize it? Read on for wisdom:

"People who are masters aren't afraid to speak simply and clearly"
Olin Shivers

" Why shouldn't you do significant things in this one life, however you define significant?
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Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can.
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If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?
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You have to learn to write clearly and well so that people will read it, you must learn to give reasonably formal talks, and you also must learn to give informal talks...The technical person wants to give a highly limited technical talk. Most of the time the audience wants a broad general talk and wants much more survey and background than the speaker is willing to give. As a result, many talks are ineffective.
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You find this happening again and again; good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system and take advantage of all the system has to offer. It has a lot, if you learn how to use it. It takes patience, but you can learn how to use the system pretty well, and you can learn how to get around it...I didn't say you should conform; I said the appearance of conforming gets you a long way...By realizing you have to use the system and studying how to get the system to do your work, you learn how to adapt the system to your desires. Or you can fight it steadily, as a small undeclared war, for the whole of your life."

Richard Hamming, You and Your Research