The Three Golden Rules for Successful Scientific Research

The Three Golden Rules for Successful Scientific Research
A famous computer scientist, Edsger W. Dijkstra, was writing short memos on a daily basis for most of his life. His memo archives contains a little over 1300 memos. I guess today he would be writing a blog, although his memos do tend to be slightly more profound than what I post.
Here are the rules (follow link for commentary), which I tried to summarize:

• Pursue quality and challenge, avoid routine. ("Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward.")
  
• When pursuing social relevance, never compromise on scientific soundness. ("We all like our work to be socially relevant and scientifically sound. If we can find a topic satisfying both desires, we are lucky; if the two targets are in conflict with each other, let the requirement of scientific soundness prevail.")
  
• Solve the problems nobody can solve better than you. ("Never tackle a problem of which you can be pretty sure that (now or in the near future) it will be tackled by others who are, in relation to that problem, at least as competent and well-equipped as you.")