Back
Steven Levy: Hackers (2010, O'Reilly Media, Incorporated)

Besides being a technical genius, Nelson would attack problems with bird-dog perseverance. "He approached problems by taking action," Donald Eastlake, a hacker in Nelson's class, later recalled. "He was very persistent. If you try a few times and give up, you'll never get there. But if you keep at it... There's a lot of problems in the world which can really be solved by applying two or three times the persistence that other people will."

— Hackers by  (Page 86)

This reminds me of when Noam Chomsky spoke at Google. The interviewer asked him if he had anything to say to the collected engineers. He asked them something like, "Why not work on the really hard problems?"