I think I've succeeded more by learning what needed to be done

In the workshop of patient thunder, John Kendrew speaks a clear rule of craft: “I think I’ve succeeded more by learning what needed to be done next and getting help in getting it done. I was just very focused and impatient.” Mark the sequence—learning, next, help, focused, impatient—for it is a road of stepping-stones. He does not praise brilliance untethered from action; he honors the humble art of deciding the next necessary thing, then gathering companions to push it across the line. In this saying, ambition is yoked to method, and urgency is married to cooperation.

To learn what needed to be done next is to practice temporal wisdom. Many fail not for lack of talent, but for lack of ordering—grasping at distant milestones while stumbling over the stone at their feet. Kendrew’s counsel is to plot the journey one ridge at a time. You survey the mountain, yes, but then you choose the switchback you must cut now, with the tools you actually hold. This is the old discipline of triage and the older discipline of discernment: do first what unlocks the rest.

Then, get help. The ancients taught that the lone hero is a useful myth and a poor method. The world’s stubborn problems—whether in science, art, or civic life—resist solitary siege but yield to guilds of patient hands. Kendrew does not boast of self-sufficiency; he boasts of recruitment—of machinists and model-builders, mathematicians and coders, students and skeptics—who together make the impossible merely difficult and the difficult eventually done. To ask for aid is not to confess weakness; it is to widen your competence through the strengths of others.

His confession of being focused and impatient is not an apology. It is an admission that time has a texture and that great work requires a furnace of attention. Focus gathers heat; impatience, rightly harnessed, becomes fuel rather than flame-out. The unruled impatient person breaks tools; the disciplined impatient person sharpens schedules. Thus Kendrew names the alchemy: turn restlessness into cadence—short, exacting cycles of attempt, feedback, and revision.

Consider the lamp of his own life. In the mid-twentieth century, Kendrew and his colleagues sought the first high-resolution structure of a protein—myoglobin—a task that seemed like reading the grain of stone by moonlight. They broke the darkness by cutting it into pieces: crystals prepared, heavy-atom derivatives made, Fourier maps calculated by rooms of helpers at great tables and later by early computers, models assembled with rods and wires against electron-density clouds like weather charts of the atomic world. He did not leap directly to triumph; he learned the next thing, then the next, and each time he got help. The crown—an image of folded life never before seen—rested not on a single head, but on a bench crowded with hands.

From this the origin of the saying grows plain: it springs from laboratories where success is not a bolt from heaven but a braid of iterations. It carries the humility of someone who knows that foresight is often just well-managed hindsight; that breakthroughs are the crest of a wave built by countless, smaller ripples; that a good leader is a curator of tasks and a steward of other people’s genius. It is the voice of a builder of bridges, not a collector of medals.

What, then, shall we do with this teaching? Make a small liturgy of progress. Each morning, write the single next action that, if completed, will make tomorrow’s work lighter. Name the help you need, and ask for it before noon. Guard an hour of focus—no chimes, no chatter—where you move one hard thing one clear step. Harness impatience by shortening feedback loops: prototype, test, adjust, again. And when you stand at day’s end, measure not applause but the clearing of obstacles. For in this cadence—learning the next necessity, getting help, staying focused, spending impatience wisely—your work will, like Kendrew’s map of atoms, bring hidden structures into view and turn distant hopes into usable truth.