Author: Richard P. Feynman
Started: 2024-08-01
Finished: 2024-08-20
Despite the fact that Richard Feynman was among the most famous scientists of the 20th century, who also produced a voluminous quantity of autobiographical information1, surprisingly little has been written about the traits that made him special. Essentially the only thing we hear about is the “Feynman technique”2 and his prankster nature.
So I read this book to understand how Feynman came to be who he was; how he worked, how he thought about himself, how he interacted with others, unique aspects of his personality, and so on.
He was extraordinarily persistent
What stands out throughout the book is just how damn persistent Feynman was, in everything. As a boy, Feynman was obsessed with fixing electronics and became so good that he acquired a reputation as the local electronics wunderkind. Here he is talking about a particularly gnarly attempt:
I finally fixed (the radio) because I had, and still have, persistence. Once I get on a puzzle, I can’t get off. If my mother’s friend had said, “Never mind, it’s too much work,” I’d have blown my top, because I want to beat this damn thing, as long as I’ve gone this far. I can’t just leave it after I’ve found out so much about it. I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end.
He called this tenacity, his “puzzle drive”:
That’s a puzzle drive. It’s what accounts for my wanting to decipher Mayan hieroglyphics, for trying to open safes. I remember in high school, during first period a guy would come to me with a puzzle in geometry, or something which had been assigned in his advanced math class. I wouldn’t stop until I figured the damn thing out—it would take me fifteen or twenty minutes.
This set-up a virtuous cycle: the better he got at solving technical problems, the more people came to him when they were stuck on something, and so the more he was exposed to different types of challenges and how to solve them:
So I got a fancy reputation. During high school every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew.
This is why building in public is so important. There’s no doubt Feynman was intellectually overclocked, but his skills were also honed through these thousands of hours of practice. He continued this habit at MIT, where he would talk with more senior students and attempt to solve homework problems with them. In one example, he talks about by correctly pointing out that Bernoulli’s equation might be helpful in solving a physics problem his older roommates had been struggling with. He knew this was the right approach because he’d come across this equation during his high-school years.
His tenacity wasn’t limited to intellectual challenges. He shares the story about being hazed by his fraternity, but he fought hard because he didn’t want to be seen as a “sissy”. There’s a saying how you do anything is how you do everything and it really is true. Being persistent seems to be a kind of trait among geniuses.
During his time at Los Alamos, Feynman learned to crack safes. He got so good at it that he even cracked one safe that at the time was marketed as unbreakable – all through relentless practice:
It took me about a year and a half to get that far (of course, I was working on the bomb, too!) but I figured that I had the safes beaten, in the sense that if there was a real difficulty—if somebody was lost, or dead, and nobody else knew the combination but the stuff in the filing cabinet was needed—I could open it.
The particulars of his technique aren’t important, but he shares how that we was constantly practicing it, until it just became something he did unconsciously:
Of course I was able to open the safe because of my perpetual habit of taking the last two numbers off. While in Oak Ridge the month before, I was in the same office when the safe was open and I took the numbers off in an absent-minded way—I was always practicing my obsession.
Most people lack patience. When he was cracking open the “uncrackable” safe, and it was taking a while, he shares how people weren’t even patient enough to watch him do it:
By this time most of the people had drifted off. They didn’t have the patience to watch me do this, but the only way to solve such a thing is patience!
Later when he went to Brazil he started playing the frigideira, an improvised percussion instrument local to the area, and he was asked to join a local band to play in the Carnivale. He wanted to become good and so he practiced constantly:
I practiced all the time. I’d walk along the beach holding two sticks that I had picked up, getting the twisty motion of the wrists, practicing, practicing, practicing. I kept working on it, but I always felt inferior, that I was some kind of trouble, and wasn’t really up to it.
How many of us would give up at the first sign of emotional discomfort at not being bad at something? I know I have – many times. The last thing I’ll say on persistence is something I asked my my academic advisor (the late, great B.V. McKoy) once: when to give up on a problem versus persisting to the end? He told me that knowing that balance is a difficult skill, and only acquired through experience. So I found the following anecdote by Feynman interesting:
While I was still a graduate student at Princeton, I worked as a research assistant under John Wheeler. He gave me a problem to work on, and it got hard, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. So I went back to an idea that I had had earlier, at MIT.
He mentions how he would often work on several problems simultaneously, and liked teaching courses, so that the could feel progress in at least one area even if he was stuck in main research question.
He had high openness to experience
Among the various tests of personality, the Big 5 is often considered among the most well-validated (others include Myers-Biggs, Enneagrams)
After the war, every summer I would go traveling by car somewhere in the United States. One year, after I was at Caltech, I thought, “This summer, instead of going to a different place, I’ll go to a different field.”