He had been given the award at the end of the ceremony and he had thanked the committee and then, at the reception, he could not bring himself to talk about it. A younger researcher came up and asked him, earnestly, what his secret was, and he said that he had been lucky in his collaborators and his mentors and the specific decade he'd started his career in. He meant this. It was the boring answer and also the true one. He knew what he had done well. He also knew exactly how many pieces had to fall into place for anything to matter, and how many of those pieces were out of his hands.