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I was finally able to read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, a book about the life of the eccentric physicist, Richard Feynman, after having it on my list for a long time.
This book was recommended by Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Naval Ravikant, Tim Ferris, and multiple guests in Tim’s Tools of Titans. So obviously, I was curious.
I knew about Richard Feynman when I read about the Feynman learning technique (more on that later) and his involvement in the Manhattan project, which was the research and development undertaking that produced the first nuclear bomb.
What I did not know about Richard Feynman was the number of hats he wore, his eccentricity, his humour, his chivalry, and above all his curiosity. This book sheds light on that part of his life.
I initially found this book weird in the way it was written; it seemed as if Mr. Feynman was writing for kids.
And that was because of what I had expected from the book.
I was expecting it to be more of an autobiography and include more details about the Manhattan project. After adjusting my judgement about the book, I found it really interesting.
You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.
Richard Feynman
The book is basically a compilation of adventures that Mr. Feynman had in his lifetime. And boy he had some adventures!
You will almost feel like you’re reading about Forrest Gump.
So here are the major lessons I learned from the book.
Life Is About Experiences
Feynman was open to experiences. Open is an understatement here.
Here is a list of subjects he touched on. And when I say touched, he kind of almost mastered them.
Physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, linguistics, teaching, writing, gambling, sketching, lock picking, music, seduction (he got a lot of shit for that), lucid dreaming, hallucinations, and a lot more.
I knew Feynman was a physicist and I knew he won the Nobel Prize. But I had no idea that he understood so many subjects. And how did he understand them? Being curious.
Based on his writing, I hardly think he said no to learning or trying something new which interested him. He would hear about something, try it out, learn about it, apply it, and move on. When he was moving on, he would hear something else from a person who was doing something, he will try it out, learn about it, and so on. His book is all about experiences.
We all experience this, don’t we? You start working on something and you find something new which leads you to a third thing. It at least happens to me. I went from learning how to create a website, to blogging, podcasting, audio editing, and finally graphic designing in about a 3-month span.
Keeping An Open Mind About Learning
One thing that was common in most of his chapters was that he always had an open mind about learning things. What do I mean by an open mind about learning?
He met a guy from the US Embassy who loved samba music. He went to his apartment to listen to the music and ended up picking up an instrument called frigidaire. After a lot of practising with the group, he went on to participate in competitions. Once he picked up playing music, he continued doing it in his free time.
I found this very interesting. Very often than not, I am very judgemental of what I am doing and how am I spending my time. But Feynman just did it, if he was sufficiently curious.
Talking to People
How did Feynman learn new ideas? By talking to different people. I am not talking about how he learned things but just how did he get to know so many subjects.
Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile.
He talked to people from all kinds of fields, industries, and strata of society.
He talked to Oppenheimer, Einstein, and Bohr. But he also talked to showgirls in Vegas who took him around the town and kept him company. He talked to Leo Lavatelli to learn how to pick locks which led to picking locks with nuclear codes in them when he was in Los Alamos. Later, he met Nick the Greek and learned about gambling. He made money not by playing at the table but by knowing the odds at the tables and betting against people who had superstitious beliefs. And the list goes on.
It’s the same story; Feynman talks to someone about art and then learns how to sketch and makes money by selling paintings. Feynman talks to a cab driver about South America, ends up in Brazil, and plays music at the Carnaval.
In recent years, this is something that I have picked up on as well. The more people you talk to, the more things you learn about the world. It applies to social media as well but with social media comes a lot of filtering of things.
Specialization is for insects.
Learn with an open mind. Talk to people. Be curious. And if you are curious, try it out!
All the time you’re saying to yourself, I could do that but I won’t – which is just another way of saying that you can’t.
Richard Feynman
Let’s Talk About Learning – Richard Feynman Way
Feynman didn’t learn. He understood.
There is a huge difference.
I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way – by rote or something. Their knowledge is fragile. This kind of fragility is, in fact, fairly common, even with more learned people”
Richard Feynman
First Principle Thinking
This is my understanding of how Feynman learned based on his writing in the book.
He always started from the very base. He questioned his way, experimented, and got to the problem. And obviously, because he understood the base so perfectly, he was able to come up with an answer to the problem.
Let me explain.
In the book, he talks about reviewing a textbook in a student’s curriculum. The textbook had diagrams of a) A wind-up toy b) automobiles c) a boy riding a bicycle. And underneath the diagrams, it said, “What makes them go?”
Now having studied at Mumbai University, I was quick to answer energy.
But does it mean anything? He questions, what is energy?
The way he approaches diagram a) is that the textbook should have talked about the toy itself. Explained how it was made, if there were springs, how did the spring function. If there were wheels, how did the wheels function?
When the students know sufficiently about the toy, they would have been able to figure out that energy is being generated which is being used to move the toy.
He explains that because of the way questions are framed in textbooks, students are only learning superficially without being curious. They are only learning to answer the questions, not because they want to understand. Students don’t know if they are learning something or just pretending to learn.
The problem is not people being uneducated. The problem is that people are educated just enough to believe what they have been taught, and not educated enough to question anything from what they have been taught
This is the concept of the first principles I talked about in my post about mental models. If you start learning about things at the very base level, you can build-up on them more efficiently. More so, you will be able to better connect your learning from one field to another.
Richard Feynman took it to the next level. He even experimented and confirmed existing research that he used for his own experiments using his own data, just to be sure!
Pompous Foolery
Another aspect of learning, Richard Feynman talks about is superficially learning things to boast. He calls them pompous fools.
Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools- guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus – THAT I CANNOT STAND!
Richard Feynman
A general theme of the book is Richard Feynman explaining that if you understand a concept, you will be able to explain it to anyone, even a 5-year-old kid. But if you don’t, you will throw a lot of jargon at them, words that you know mean nothing, just to pretend that you are knowledgeable.
He talks about this through an example where a paper he read stated, “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels”. It basically means people read.
Richard Feynman had an absolute, unvarying pursuit of rationality and truth. Feynman would rather admit that he didn’t know something than believe in false knowledge (Farnam Street talking about Richard Feynman).
The Feynman Technique
It was difficult at first, but gradually it got easier, and finally, I had enough confidence that I wasn’t afraid
Richard Feynman
A lot of the book focuses on how Feynman was curious about different subjects. However, it doesn’t state explicitly anywhere the technique he used to learn. So I got really confused because I thought I will be learning the Feynman technique from the man himself but there is no mention of it.
I wish I read this before I did my engineering. Nevertheless, I will describe it below.
- Define the problem – what is the concept you are trying to learn? Be very explicit about it. Define the problem at the most basic level.
- Research and collect review material – Collect as many things as you can about the topic, read them, write them down. Make sure, if there are other concepts you are using in your problem, you create a separate page explaining those concepts. Everything needs to be simplified.
- Explain to a 5th-grade kid – Once you have done enough research, write the concept down as if you are teaching a 5th-grade kid complete with diagrams. Even consider the attention span of a 5-year-old. You need to make it succinct and entertaining.
- Find the gaps in your understanding – Once you try to explain it to a 5th-grade kid, you will find obvious gaps in your own understanding. You will realize you are using jargon yourself. Go back to step 2, review more material, and try simplifying it further.
What this technique does, as you can see, is to help you bring any problem to the most basic level and simplify the solution for you (Farnam Street explaining the concept even in more detail).
I personally, so many times, tend to read about something and pretend to have understood it. But what I have read, doesn’t mean I have understood it! Only when you write things down, do you actually learn and find the gaps?
Favourite Chapters
- O Americano, Outro Vez! – In this chapter, Feynman rants about the education system in Brazil. He talks about how textbooks only provide a definition. The book never talks about the practical applicability of the problem or basic ideas that would make students experiment, and be curious.
- Cargo Cult Science – Where do I even begin with this chapter? It’s a commencement speech he gave at the California Institute of Technology and also, the final chapter of the book. He talks about how researchers should avoid fooling themselves, be willing to question and doubt their own theories and their own results, and investigate possible flaws in a theory or an experiment. He says the researchers should be really honest with their experiments and the results that are published. It is highly applicable to others as well.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”
Richard Feynman
Here is a link if you would like to listen to the adapted audio version of the chapter
What were your thoughts about the book? You will also like my article on Cargo Cult Thinking made famous by Richard Feynman.
