 Bill Gates remembers Richard Feynman as the best teacher he never had. Feynman was an American physicist and Nobel Prize winner for his groundbreaking work in Quantum Electrodynamics. Incidentally, Feynman wasn't famous just for being a great teacher and a world-class scientist. He was also quite a character. He translated Mayan hieroglyphics, he loved to play the bongos, and while helping develop the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, he entertained himself by figuring out how to break into the safes that contained top-secret research. Feynman cultivated this image as a colorful guy. Hello everyone and welcome back! If you're new to the channel, this is yet another attempt to absorb distil and digest ideas from books I found captivating and interesting to read. And the one I found interesting for this particular month is Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman. And again, as a quick intro, Richard Feynman was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work in Quantum Electrodynamics. He was also part of the Manhattan Project crew in World War II, and if like me you're not a physicist, maybe you stumble upon this diagram which represents the mathematics behind how subatomic particles work. He was the guy who made it all possible. Now Feynman was also very well known for his casual slash dynamic slash friendly type of teaching, which is why he received the nickname The Great's Explainer, as he was able to twist and play with very hard to grasp concepts and make them easy to understand. If you want to see him in action, you can find videos of his lectures online. Now this book is full of short stories from taped conversations with Ralph Layton, who's actually Feynman's drumming partner. The book is divided into five chapters, each one containing short stories about Feynman's life. And what I want to do is extract the key ideas I found interesting in the book and really try to deconstruct Feynman's personality, thinking patterns, education, and much more. Now the first key idea I found interesting is about timing and taking advantage of opportunities. Jumping straight into the first chapter, what I noticed is that the introduction starts with Feynman writing some facts about my timing. Now the timing part hit me once I started reading the book, and what resonated with me was this unperceivable veil of humbleness. This makes me think that Feynman was aware of his luck and his situational context, which is why he used the word timing. As I find timing an important ingredient in research and innovation, because with suboptimal timing, even mind-blowing products are unlikely to make an impact. And Bill Gates' career is a perfect example. Born in a well-off family in 1955, he was old enough to hammer and take advantage of his situation. With computers at the private school he was attending in his teens, and also placing him next to the 1974 Altair 8800, which was the first do-it-yourself computer kit. And you can read more about it in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Going back to the book, I actually enjoyed the first story where Feynman is describing his passion for technology. When I was 11 or 12, I set up a lab in my house. It consisted of an old wooden packing box that I put shelves in, I had a heater and I put in fat and took french-fried potatoes all the time. I also had a storage battery and a lamp bank. Feynman was also very fond of radios and really enjoyed buying and fixing all or broken ones, just for the sake of it. Feynman enjoyed deconstructing things, tearing them apart, learning and understanding how they work and putting them back together. And word quickly gets out. There's even this story where young Feynman received a call from the hotel his aunt was running, and he was asked to come in and fix their radio. And armed with a simple screwdriver, shaking confidence in his curiosity, the boy went to the hotel and fixed the damn radio. And Feynman admitted that there was a mix of luck and timing, but also persistence. There were of course radios he could not fix, but as the jobs got more complex, he got himself more tools and learned more about fixing them even faster. And young Richard eventually got hired by more acquaintances, converting DC sets to AC sets and also fixing roof antennas. He was skillful and didn't ask for much in return, as he was just a kid. So people hired him. And this was happening during the Great Depression, a time when people had no money to pay a specialized individual to fix their tech. So they were satisfied with a young boy who could do it for cheap. Now, the key lesson I've managed to pull out is about being aware of your situational context, of your unfair advantage, in Feynman's case, the passion for technology, and taking advantage of each opportunity you get. And even though you might not be that confident at the beginning, simply remembering that the things around you were built by people just like yourself can be a great mental trick you can use. And even if things don't work out as you were expecting, you will still have a lot to learn out of each piece of experience. Also doing things for free is great when just starting out, while obviously keeping an active student mindset. The second key idea I extracted is about getting out of your comfort zone. Now, Feynman went to school at MIT, originally majoring in mathematics and then switching to electrical engineering. He later switched to physics, achieving a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exam to Princeton University. He went to Princeton thanks to one of his professors who unveiled the opportunity for Feynman to see the world and get a taste for the different and the unknown. Young Feynman was much too attached of the idea of MIT, which was indeed the best school in the country, and in Feynman's words, Princeton was an imitation of an English school. And Feynman was oftentimes rough and unpolished, and he cared more about being right or wrong than the standard operating procedures and aesthetics of the academia. And he also knew that he was going to be judged by his informal manners and not being able to integrate socially. And in fact, this is how the title of the book came to be. As Princeton was an imitation of an English school such as Oxford or Cambridge, one of the fancy people could be found everywhere. So there's this story with this young Feynman fellow being invited to the Dean's Tea Party with other students as well. And again, he was rough and unpolished and he was afraid of screwing something up. So when a lady asked him how he would take his tea, either with cream or with lemon, Feynman said both. And then she replied, Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman, in a British kind of way. He learned a lot of things from different schools. And one of them was that technology always wins. What struck Feynman is different about Princeton was the visible resemblance to his lab back home. And one day he wanted to see this cyclotron, which is a type of compact particle accelerator. And he also had one at MIT, his old school. But the reason why Feynman got interested in this one was due to the way people at Princeton worked with such a machine. Feynman said at one point that the whole cyclotron was there in one room and it was complete absolute chaos. It reminded me of my lab at home and nothing at MIT had ever reminded me of my lab back home. I suddenly realized why Princeton was getting results. They were working with the instrument. They built the instrument. They knew where everything was. They knew how everything worked. He also found that sometimes books were not tackling all of the world's complexities, which Feynman observed. He used to say that these books always simplify things so that the world will be more like they want it to be. And from this point he understood why his professor asked him to go to another school for his graduate work. Because learning what the rest of the world is like will eventually support one's evolution, adding new influences and fresh ideas into the mix, new ways to look at things and analyze one's work and life. And this was actually getting Feynman even closer to the bright minds of his generation, such as Einstein or von Neumann, who were actually in the audience of his first seminar. And contemplating his talk on the seminar, he said that the moment I started to think about the physics and have to concentrate on what I'm explaining, nothing else occupies my mind. So after I started to go, I just didn't know who was in the room. I was only explaining this idea. And that's all. My take on this one is that ultimately the solution, the outcome, should be prioritized instead of thinking about the weight of your audience, the emotions surrounding that audience, the criticism, the debates, the follow-ups. So feel free to compose, paint, read, write, program like nobody's watching because oftentimes nobody is, in fact, watching. And kind of try to keep in mind that education feels better when the process of getting educated is organic. If Feynman was obsessed with something like fixing his radios, he would probably spend the whole day thinking and working on fixing the problem. And nobody was asking him to do it and sort of be part of a program that was asking for streamlined completionism. And I also have collected some funny bits about Feynman, but this one in particular is in regards to some piece of advice he gave at some point on how to be a genius. Feynman said that in order to be a genius you have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems in your mind. Although by any large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your 12 problems to see whether it helps. And every once in a while there will be a hit. People will say, how did he do it? He must be a genius. Not taking yourself too seriously can also be good for one's mental well-being. Understanding that you are a student of life. And while Feynman was indeed a rationalist his sense of humor was insane. He really enjoyed joking around even with his fellow physicist working on the Manhattan Project. And this brings one other idea I found interesting which is about questioning everything but paying attention to the levels of abstraction. There's a story where Feynman was inside Cornell's university's cafeteria and he saw a guy throwing a plate and the plate wobbled through the air. Feynman was intrigued at how the Cornell medallion on the plate rotated faster than it wobbled and he tried to figure out the equations and he explained excitedly to his physicist colleague about what he had discovered but his colleague thought that it was unimportant to work the dynamics out. However, Feynman decided that he was going to do whatever he liked. He would still do physics like he used to play with physics in school. He didn't have to put himself under immense pressure to get some kind of important results or accomplishments. And that decision freed and cleared his mind. And he went on to calculate and relate electron orbits with direct equation and electrodynamics. And all of his work in quantum electrodynamics eventually won him and his two other colleagues a Nobel Prize. Feynman's optimism allowed him to connect with people in a very human, nice and worm way. His curiosity, creativity and contrarian viewpoints gave him the ability to do special things and he was also meant to rewrite textbooks and create new equations and change the lives of millions. But the reason one might want to find an answer to this type of question is only to satisfy one's curiosity. And if that can lead to something else, like a Nobel Prize, that's even better. And I do also have some closing thoughts. Mainly understand that you are in control of your time. Also be open to experiments if you are new to a field either that being something that might seem complex like physics, mathematics or even something that's more down to earth such as video productions, writing, sketching. You need to allow yourself room to work but also to play as everything comes through experimentation and if you manage to find a way so that work can become play you might be setting yourself on a path to freedom.