Book
Avoid Boring People
A memoir of a life in science, built around the three-word rule with the deliberate double meaning.
James D. Watson · 2007
Watson’s memoir of his career from Chicago undergraduate to the leadership of Cold Spring Harbor. Each chapter ends with a set of blunt “remembered lessons” — on choosing advisers, picking problems, and managing institutions.
The title is the shortest of them, and it works two ways: don’t spend your time around dull people, and don’t be one. The site’s Avoid Boring People lesson pulls that thread out on its own.