Richard Feynman, Isaac Asimov, Harry Glicken, Douglas Adams, Jon Krakauer, Isaac Newton, Bill Watterson, Konrad Zuse, Marvin Minsky, Alan Turing, Steve Jobs, Nikola Tesla, Musashi Miyamoto, Stephen Wolfram, Leo Szilard, Charles Darwin, Haruki Murakami, Kentarou Miura, Anatoli Boukreev, John D. Clark, Viktor Frankl, Alex Honnold, Valery Legasov, Barry Marshall, Albert Einstein, Tommaso Toffoli The reason I like to work on difficult things, even those that seem totally hopeless, is about respect. If there is a common characteristic among the people who I hold in the highest esteem, it is that each one of them did something profoundly difficult, at great personal risk, without expectation of any sort of reward, because they were obsessed by the task at hand and compelled to attempt it against all common sense. Some of them actually died for it. When I'm not sure what to do, I try to imagine what they would have done, and what sort of choices they would respect.