Extraordinary levels of drive. This kept both of them at the top of their respective professions for decades. I watched ‘The Secret Life of Bob Monkhouse‘ on BBC4 last night. Monkhouse was a driven complex man who worked very hard to stay at the top of comedy/light-entertainment from the late 1940s almost until his death in 2003. You might think the comedian and host of Family Fortunes would have little in common with Isaac Newton. But Newton was another driven complex man. Although of course clearly one with different talents, he was a mathematical genius with great physical intuition, but would have made an exceptionally poor stand-up.

Staying near the top of a competitive profession, which is what both science and light enetertainment can be, must be almost impossible without out of the ordinary levels of drive, of determination. Fortunately for people with more normal levels of determination, like me, you can do OK in science without this.

But even so, science is often hard work, and so requires dedication. At the moment I am working on modelling some experimental data. The data is hard to acquire and so noisy. This makes it hard work to draw conclusions you can be certain of.

Fortunately, there are number of us working on the problem, so we can each push each other on. Most science is done in teams and a good team spirit can really help the non-Newton/Monkhouse types among us.