Jim Simons
Beauty, and the best people
He published his own principles
Simons, Mathematics, Common Sense and Good Luck, MIT 2010
A man who made his fortune out of algorithms summed up a career in five principles. Not one of them is about mathematics.
What actually happened?
In 2010 Simons went back to MIT and compressed a career into a short list. Work with the smartest people you can find, ideally smarter than you are. Be guided by beauty — he said it applies not only to theorems but to a company that runs well or a problem solved elegantly, and that following it rarely goes wrong. Don't give up easily: the paper he wrote with Chern took years. And the last one he refused to dress up. Hope for good luck. The room laughed. He said he meant it.
Hiring above yourself is a rule, not a pose
The first teams he built after leaving academia were mathematicians, astronomers and speech-recognition scientists, none of whom knew finance. He was betting on raw problem-solving power, not domain experience. The rule has a hard test: if you are always the sharpest person present, you are not following it.
Ask of every hire whether there is a part of the job they are visibly better at than you. A year of hires with nobody intimidating in it means the bar has slipped.
Beauty is compressed experience
Be guided by beauty sounds mystical and works as a fast classifier. After years in a field, a solution that is spare and well-jointed registers as beautiful, and one patched on top of patches registers as wrong, before the argument is finished. The signal is not proof. It says where to dig.
Two architectures both work. One feels right to the old engineer, the other feels off and he cannot say why. Dig into the second one first.
Putting luck on the list is honest and also strategic
Admitting how much was luck stops you filing a random success under personal genius. The outward consequence is that if luck matters you should enlarge the surface you expose to it: more attempts, more years still in the game, more time near well-informed people.
Give every success post-mortem a column for tailwinds you did not control. Teams that can fill it in do not despair the first time the wind turns.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: you are writing down your own method and the list is all technique.
Ask first: do people, taste and luck appear anywhere on it? When did I last work beside somebody clearly better than me?
Where it goes wrong: using beauty to veto anything unfamiliar; or using luck matters as cover for not having done the work.
Lines to keep
Don't give up easily, and hope for some good luck.
Same situation, other people are asking
I've tried rewards and I've tried consequences. Neither moved anything.How do I push them without breaking them?I keep restating the standard and nothing changes.Nobody argues with me any more and nothing gets done.The team has gone flat · all 10 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.