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The Feynman Method to be a Genius
Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and 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 twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”
- sanj 16y agoFound in Rota's lessons, here: http://www.math.tamu.edu/~cyan/Rota/tenlesses.pdf http://www.math.tamu.edu/~cyan/Rota/tenlesses.pdf
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoHamming said the same thing: Most great scientists know many important problems. They have something between 10 and 20 important problems for which they are looking for an attack. And when they see a new idea come up, one hears them say "Well that bears on this problem." They drop all the other things and get after it. Now I can tell you a horror story that was told to me but I can't vouch for the truth of it. I was sitting in an airport talking to a friend of mine from Los Alamos about how it was lucky that the fission experiment occurred over in Europe when it did because that got us working on the atomic bomb here in the US. He said "No; at Berkeley we had gathered a bunch of data; we didn't get around to reducing it because we were building some more equipment, but if we had reduced that data we would have found fission." They had it in their hands and they didn't pursue it. They came in second! The great scientists, when an opportunity opens up, get after it and they pursue it. They drop all other things. They get rid of other things and they get after an idea because they had already thought the thing through. Their minds are prepared; they see the opportunity and they go after it. Now of course lots of times it doesn't work out, but you don't have to hit many of them to do some great science. It's kind of easy. One of the chief tricks is to live a long time! "You and Your Research" http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
- nathanb 16y agoThe implied second step to this method is that you have to be constantly on the alert to hear or read about new tricks. In Feynman's time this was much more difficult in industry than in academia, but nowadays thanks to the Internet I suspect it is applicable even if you work a desk job at a software development firm.
- DennisP 16y agoThis is my excuse for browsing HN all day instead of working. Just being a genius!
- sagacity 16y agoKudos to you. :-)
- mathgladiator 16y agoI hope you are working towards being effective. I did, and my job basically became read HN for 4+ hours a day.
- DennisP 16y agoYeah it's a lot easier keeping up with the day job these days.