Richard Feynman. Why.
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Richard Feynman. Why.
Feynman’s approach was to maintain a list of a dozen open questions. When a new scientific finding came out, he would test it against each of his questions to see if it shed any new light on the problem. This cross-disciplinary approach allowed him to make connections across seemingly unrelated subjects, while continuing to follow his sense of curi
... See moreTiago Forte • Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential
When our goal is to understand something, we start getting curious: why does this work this way, and not that way? Why doesn't this do what I expected? Strange! These observations of strangeness, where pieces of the understanding puzzle don't fit, lead to exploring beyond what's known.
Kanjun Qiu • Research as Understanding ∙ Kanjun Qiu
sari added
Feynman’s approach encouraged him to follow his interests wherever they might lead. He posed questions and constantly scanned for solutions to long-standing problems in his reading, conversations, and everyday life. When he found one, he could make a connection that looked to others like a flash of unparalleled brilliance.
Tiago Forte • Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential
to avoid this problem of fooling yourself is simply to ask lots of questions. Feynman took this approach himself: “Some people think in the beginning that I’m kind of slow and I don’t understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these ‘dumb’ questions: ‘Is a cathode plus or minus? Is an an-ion this way, or that way?’”*16 How many of us lack the c
... See moreScott Young • Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career
Feynman is one of the few who rarely took his knowledge base for granted, who always remembered the building blocks, the elements that lay underneath each question and each principle. And that is precisely what Holmes means when he tells us that we must begin with the basics, with such mundane problems that they might seem beneath our notice.
Maria Konnikova • Mastermind
Kaustubh Sule added
.modelthinking
But Feynman’s brilliance was not solely due to his natural cognitive abilities. He relied on a method : a simple technique for seeing the world through the lens of open-ended questions, which he called his “favorite problems.”
Tiago Forte • 12 Favorite Problems: How to Spark Genius With the Power of Open Questions
The physicist Richard Feynman once said, “Learn by trying to understand simple things in terms of other ideas—always honestly and directly.”
Safi Bahcall • Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
Curiosity demands that we ask questions, that we try to put things together and try to understand this multitude of aspects as perhaps resulting from the action of a relatively small number of elemental things and forces acting in an infinite variety of combinations.