I felt like I was stretching to convince the world that my work was interesting, yet no one cared. Martin’s axiom gave me a reprieve from this self-promotion. “Stop focusing on these little details,” it told me. “Focus instead on becoming better.” Inspired, I turned my attention from my website to a habit that continues to this day: I track the hours spent each month dedicated to thinking hard about research problems (in the month in which I first wrote this chapter, for example, I dedicated forty-two hours to these core tasks).
