Alan Veeck

Founder, Summit Procurement @ & host of REBUILD pod @

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

FYI, have used visualization with both pro level athletic and business clients (for pitches, talks, etc.) and it's so incredibly effective.

Looks nuts, but backed by science and improves performance.

[Balaji @balajis]

The right kind of ambition is to compete against yourself. To be the best version of yourself.

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

Underrated life skill: Listening without waiting to talk. You’ll be shocked by how much people tell you if you actually let them finish. What folks want isn’t advice. It’s your attention. You don’t win people over with your story. You win them over by letting them finish theirs.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A mathematician who shared an office with Claude Shannon at Bell Labs gave one lecture in 1986 that explains why some people win Nobel Prizes and other equally smart people spend their whole lives doing forgettable work.

His name was Richard Hamming. He won the Turing Award. He invented error-correcting codes that made modern computing possible. And he spent 30 years at Bell Labs sitting in a cafeteria at lunch watching which scientists became legendary and which ones faded into nothing.

In March 1986, he walked into a Bellcore auditorium in front of 200 researchers and told them exactly what he had seen.

Here's the framework that has been quoted by every serious scientist for the last 40 years.

His opening line landed like a punch. He said most scientists he worked with at Bell Labs were just as smart as the Nobel Prize winners. Just as hardworking. Just as credentialed. And yet at the end of a 40-year career, one group had changed entire fields and the other group was forgotten by the time they retired.

He wanted to know what the difference actually was. And he said it wasn't luck. It wasn't IQ. It was a specific set of habits that almost nobody is willing to follow.

The first habit was the one that hurts the most to hear. He said most scientists deliberately avoid the most important problem in their field because the odds of failure are too high. They pick a safe adjacent problem, solve it cleanly, publish it, and move on. And because they never swing at the hard problem, they never hit it. He said if you do not work on an important problem, it is unlikely you will do important work. That is not a motivational line. That is a logical one.

The second habit was about doors. Literal doors. He noticed that the scientists at Bell Labs who kept their office doors closed got more done in the short term because they had no interruptions. But the scientists who kept their doors open got more done over a career. The open-door scientists were interrupted constantly. They also absorbed every new idea passing through the hallway. Ten years in, they were working on problems the closed-door scientists did not even know existed.

The third habit was inversion. When Bell Labs refused to give him the team of programmers he wanted, Hamming sat with the rejection for weeks. Then he flipped the question. Instead of asking for programmers to write the programs, he asked why machines could not write the programs themselves. That single inversion pushed him into the frontier of computer science. He said the pattern repeats everywhere. What looks like a defect, if you flip it correctly, becomes the exact thing that pushes you ahead of everyone else.

The fourth habit was the one that hit me the hardest. He said knowledge and productivity compound like interest. Someone who works 10 percent harder than you does not produce 10 percent more over a career. They produce twice as much. The gap doesn't add. It multiplies. And it compounds silently for years before anyone notices.

He finished the lecture with a line I have never been able to shake.

He said Pasteur's famous quote is right. Luck favors the prepared mind. But he meant it literally. You don't hope for luck. You engineer the conditions where luck can land on you. Open doors. Important problems. Inverted questions. Compounded hours. Those are not traits. Those are choices you make every single day.

The transcript has been sitting on the University of Virginia's computer science website for almost 30 years. The video is free on YouTube. Stripe Press reprinted the full lectures as a book in 2020 and Bret Victor wrote the foreword.

Hamming died in 1998. He gave his final lecture a few weeks before. He was 82.

The lecture that explains why some careers become legendary and others disappear is still free. Most people who could benefit from it will never open it.

[ZitoSalena @ZitoSalena]

.@geckorobotics is at the frontline in remaking the Rust Belt--located in a former mall across from the still standing walls of the Pennsylvania Canal--which contributed to the boom of the Rust Belt during the Industrial Revolution--one of my favorite stories this year

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

Jason Paige recorded the Pokémon theme song in a single take, unaware it would go on to become one of the most iconic intros of all time.

[Shane Parrish @shaneparrish]

We spend time chasing money, then spend money chasing time.

[Alan Veeck @aveeck]

god bless the child https://t.co/OBLOc615hs

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Did you know?

NASA only uses 15 digits of π for calculating interplanetary travel.

At 40 digits, you could calculate the circumference of a circle the size of the visible universe with an accuracy that'd fall off by less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

π Day 2026

[Alan Veeck @aveeck]

@CostCutPro 💯

[The Procurement Guy @CostCutPro]

@aveeck Being that first hire at 100M would be both stressful and sweet. Lots done wrong for a long time, but so much savings to capture! Prob $5-10M+

[Alan Veeck @aveeck]

@CostCutPro Com'n procurement X! Let's answer (and debate!) this one!

[The Procurement Guy @CostCutPro]

I remember in 2018 when Apple was the first to hit $1T and ppl went crazy

Now Apple is $4T and there are 10 others public companies >$1T…wild

[The Procurement Guy @CostCutPro]

Black Friday is more PsyOps than good deals

[Alan Veeck @aveeck]

🤣

[Paul @PaulOdellScott]

I had to remove my glass Klein bottle from my video background bc everyone thought it was a bong. 🤦

[Alan Veeck @aveeck]

ONLY fat - no meat trimming necessary.

[The Procurement Guy @CostCutPro]

You need to trim the fat, but need to be careful not to cut too much of the meat w/ it

[Alan Veeck @aveeck]

Truth!

[The Procurement Guy @CostCutPro]

At 10% profit margins (industry avg), $1M cost cut? Pure $1M profit boost.

To match via sales? Need $10M extra revenue (after costs). That’s 10x leverage! It’s just math

Food retail? 1% save = 20% profit pop (5% margins). Low-margin grind? Even wilder.

Execs sleep on this but it your wake-up call

[Alan Veeck @aveeck]

So right 🧠

[The Procurement Guy @CostCutPro]

Data centers are the new railroads. Everyone’s racing to build them and near 0% will do it on time or on budget

The biggest overruns won’t come from steel or chips, but from bad coordination between contractors, subs, and suppliers

CapEx execution hasn’t evolved for the AI era

[The Procurement Guy @CostCutPro]

Less than 2% of their workforce. This alone is not as dramatic as the news is making it