Author: Richard P. Feynman
Started: 2024-08-01
Finished: 2024-08-20
Rating: 7/10
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 so special. Pretty much the only thing I hear about is the “Feynman technique”2 and his prankster nature. The latter of which is amply covered in this superb autobiography.
My goal in this review is different. I read this book with an eye for gleaning anything everything I could to understand how Feynman came to be who he was: how he worked, how he thought about himself, how he interacted with others, any aspects of his personality, and so on. It turns out he shares quite a bit of information that would be useful for others.
He was extraordinarily persistent
As a boy, Feynman was obsessed with fixing electronics, and he became so good that he got quite the local reputation was an 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 became a virtuous cycle because the better he got at solving technical problem, the more people came to him with different types of problems, and so the more he was exposed to varied and diverse problems:
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.
Astute readers will recognize the building blocks of “10,000 hours of practice”, and the importance of building in public. At MIT he talks about helping out his more senior roommates stuck on a physics problem, by pointing out that Bernoulli’s equation would be helpful
But my roommates were very excited, and from then on they discussed their physics problems with me—I wasn’t so lucky with many of them—and the next year, when I took the course, I advanced rapidly.
The key
His tenacity wasn’t merely limited to fixing electronics or solving physics problems. He shares one
On openness to experience
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.”