* Work on projects you love doing, even if only part of the time. You can only be as smart as you are motivated. I will never be a smart electrician.
* Reading and learning are important, but people learn by doing, by tinkering.
* Carry a notebook or a PDA, and use it to record ideas. Periodically discard most of your ideas.
* Having a blog can’t hurt.
* This is probably the most important point: hang around with smart people. If you live among monkeys, you might have a good life, but you will not earn a Ph.D. (except if you are studying monkeys!). Happily, you can easily hang around with smart people wherever you live thanks to the Internet. This is important because if you hang around with people who do great work, you will be motivated by emulation: nobody likes to feel like a loser among his peers.
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