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I gave a whole spiel about Hawking as the "patron saint of smart people getting shit done."
There's a trap that really smart people often fall into. Einstein did it, Hawking did it. I'm a nitwit compared to them, but I definitely fell into it. The trap is that if you can be clever enough to get by without doing any work, you just don't do any work.
Hawking estimated that during his undergraduate years, he spent approximately one hour per day working.
Grad school probably would have gone about the same for him. But then he found out that he probably wouldn't survive long enough to finish. (I said mid-twenties above, but it turns out he was 21 when he was diagnosed. The same age as the students I was talking to this morning.)
Imminent death has a way of focusing the mind, as they say. And Hawking, smart as he was, finally knew that his smartness couldn't save him from everything, and he really had to put that smartness to work, real work. Within a few years, he'd proven some of the most important mathematical theorems in fundamental physics. It was a discovery that could have crowned a great scientific career, but for him it was literally just the starting point. Amazingly, he got in a full career after that, and he kept working, and kept discovering, even after his only means of communicating with the outside world was a twitch of the eye. It is mind-boggling what this man accomplished, period. But even more so considering the increasing punishment of his circumstances.
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