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Great read. I've always loved Feynman - but the word "ego" might apply. "I was working on problems close to the gods", and his list of solved (and to be fair, unsolved) investigations remind me of his "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman". Clearly the most brilliant man, and also clearly with a healthy regard for himself. One has to look out at the world and, taking in the successful and unsuccessful, conclude that some ego about oneself might be more or less required for success.

I think we all want to believe that success can "go to your head", but I am beginning to believe the opposite: it's those with temerity and a certain precise lack of hubris who go on to do great things and do not "remain nameless" to the human race. Too many engineers eschew ego as much as possible, but (as Feynman points out) sometimes it's important to congratulate yourself.

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Too few engineers eschew ego - this is Feynman's point.

Most people are not Feynman. Most engineers today think they have the capability of being Feynman one day - of course, statistics dictates that most will not be.

This is why Feynman's advice is powerful -

The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to.

Feynman here is instructing someone with too much ego, not too little. Koichi Mano thinks the problems he's working on are beneath him - that he should already be working on Feynman level problems! This is why he writes with shame to Feynman about his "humble" problem. Feynman demonstrates to him that no, no problem is too small, and backs it up with how he chipped away at "lesser" problems for a long time to build up confidence and competence. Finally, he closes with advice that could be ported to a middle manager at the smallest bureaucratic company who thinks they don't do anything important -

You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office.

If you do not have too lofty of an opinion of yourself (less ego, not more), then you will not be ashamed of the problems you succeed in, and only then might you have the chance to do something important.

> Most people are not Feynman. Most engineers today think they have the capability of being Feynman one day - of course, statistics dictates that most will not be.

But Feynman, at least in his written works, was more a reverse engineer than an actual engineer.

Feynman had a key role in engineering the computations of Manhattan Project. I have no idea what could be more like engineering than this. "With Stanley Frankel and Nicholas Metropolis, he assisted in establishing a system for using IBM punched cards for computation."

But, on the other hand, physics could be described as a way to reverse engineer nature.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#Manhattan_Proj...

Problems can be quite humbling.

Taking on big stuff isn't necessarily a "big ego" thing, but getting upset that we didn't solve the problem might be.

In my experience, big problems get solved by teams. It's important to be a good team member, even if we are "close to the gods." From what I understand, Feynman seemed to work well in teams, but I never worked with him, so I don't know.

False humility isn't helpful either.

I have worked with, and known, many truly brilliant folks. Some were unbearable, and getting on their team meant you drew the short straw.

Others were so self-effacing that it was actually embarrassing. It was difficult to be on a team with them, as we often accidentally treated them disrespectfully, or ignored their input.

I think it was Mandela that said: "You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you."

That is a powerful quote.

Apparently the author (Marianne Williamson, not Mandela) was flabbergasted and honored that her words were being attributed to Mandela. [0]

0 https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/our-deepest-fear/

Ah. Thanks for the correction. I will note that.

Yeah, that's why I said "I think."

LOTS of misattributed quotes out there.

My fave is "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet." -Abraham Lincoln.

UPDATED TO ADD:

I preface my Medium posts[0] with quotes, and those, I tend to research a bit more exhaustively. One of my entries[1] is prefaced by the quote "A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."

The quote is by John A. Shedd[2], but is often attributed to Grace Hopper, who used it one of her speeches.

[0] https://medium.com/chrismarshallny

[1] https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-...

[2] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Augustus_Shedd

My mother's favorite actor, singing a song whose German lyrics include "a ship isn't designed just to lie in the harbor; it needs to sail out to the open sea", and other more scandalous metaphors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqzX-uZUtI4

Boy, he had great teeth!

> Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

Is this really true? I've always felt that people are more likely to open up and be themselves if I demonstrate that I'm a bit unsure of myself, too.

Don't get me wrong, I _hate_ when someone presents their work by saying "here's my poor attempt at X, it isn't very good" (which is especially enraging if their work is, in fact, good). But helping to bring more quiet members of the team out of their shell by sharing a bit of my own humanity, a bit of my own weakness? That seems like it does serve the world to me.

I like your mindset. I think that we forget that we're all humans on this voyage.

Like I said, I have seen both extremes. I feel it's best when we are confident, but not cocksure.

There's always someone better. No matter how good I get, there's probably some kid in a Hanoi Internet café that can totally smoke my best.

But I won't hold back from doing my best, anyway.

Is this really true? I've always felt that people are more likely to open up and be themselves if I demonstrate that I'm a bit unsure of myself, too.

I think the key is that you shouldn't need to shrink. You can be competent and still have weaknesses that you openly acknowledge. And you can play with how you present those weaknesses, but that shouldn't require you to think less of yourself or to present yourself as less than what you are capable of.

I think my interpretation was a little bit different on the first read. But looking back at the original quote, it does say "playing small" -- as in, pretending to be smaller than you are. I agree with you that that shouldn't be necessary.

It kind of reminds me of how many people remember some particular middle school or high school teacher who had a big impact on them. It’s not like they literally saved their lives, but the way they taught and the lessons learned just stuck with folks.

I had a physics professor who liked to point out that Feynman (who we all idolized as college students studying physics) used to solve hundreds and hundreds of classical mechanics problems for fun, in his spare time. These were the same homework problems that we hated doing and always complained about.

The professor's point was, being great at something isn't just a matter of having a big powerful brain, it's also a result of putting in the work, and that work is not glamorous. A lot of people want to go straight to the big, fun, "important" problems, the big job titles and pay checks, while skipping all the toil that gets you to that level.

> used to solve hundreds and hundreds of classical mechanics problems for fun, in his spare time. [emphasis added]

You kind of missed your own (or possibly your professor's) point there: being great at something is a matter (in part) not just of putting in the work, but of having the inclination and motivation to put in so much work. If you think of it as "all the toil that gets you to that level", you're not the kind of person who is going to become great in that field.

A lesson I learned too late.

You have to be willing to do the work, yes, but also figure out what you really, really like doing, and then do it -- a lot. Over, and over, and over, for years or even decades.

A lot of times its simply difficult to find what one really likes doing. But I agree that ones who do end up "succeeding" really follow the template you propose here.

That being said, running after high remuneration in and of itself isn't bad. Sometimes its just what you have to do because a lot of other people depend on it.

Indeed, I think it creates an odd inversion over the course of the educational process. The people who started with great work ethic and the motivation of a remunerative career, but little actual interest in the content, did great in high school but eventually gave up and switched majors.

The people with variable work ethic, but who could be motivated by the subject matter itself, mastered the subject and ended up with the remunerative careers "by accident."

Sure, I guess that's one way to look at it.

"You met me at the peak of my career when I seemed to you to be concerned with problems close to the gods."

It sounds like Feynman remembered that his student thought highly of the problems he was working on late into his career. Feynman's encouraging his former student, as a recent graduate, to start out with low-hanging fruit.

He goes on to describe some of the easier problems that he worked on in the beginning of his career. That gave his former student some examples of worthwhile problems to start out with.

Personally, I think Feynman was very humble. Especially for a Nobel Prize winner.

Feynman, like everyone, has his virtues and vices, but humility is definitely not among his strong points. The majority of the stories he tells about himself are anecdotes in which he is the smart person in the room making (maybe lighthearted and friendly) fun of others with a cheaply superficial pretence of humility.

I think it's likely they are two different types of humility in Feynman's case, whether it's external vs internal humility or problem solving vs social humility or what have you. It does seem to me that Feynman had a humility in how he approached problems that was bolstered by confidence, or perhaps lack of social humility.

The advice he gives in the letter is to be humble in how one approaches which problems to solve. I think it's good advice.

In most cases he probably was the smartest person in the room.

If he managed to stay lighthearted and friendly while making fun of others he’s doing a better job than me, because I’ve lost much of my patience for stupidity.

I don't know. I remember realizing when reading some of his stories, that they are fun to read but I would find that obnoxious/annoying in person.

He seemed to be remarkably charming - so I'm not sure how annoying such behaviour actually would have been.

During the encounter you’d perhaps laugh.

Afterwards you’d find yourself dazed and confused, wondering what happened and what steamrolled you in front of everyone.

> In most cases he probably was the smartest person in the room.

Excepting the times, of course, when John von Neumann was there.

In his stories he was. And while it was fun to believe him when I was reading them as a teen, now I'm inclined to take most of it with a huge grain of salt.

he doesn't really have any right to make fun of others, though. Smart people forget that they require a tremendous amount of resources and support to make best use of their intelligence. A director may be a brilliant movie maker, but he needs a whole film company to realize his visions.

A lot of smart people berate others for their stupidity while relying on them for production power and resources to realize their visions or to make money off of them. There needs to be a lot more humility in general about others, especially since in fields like game design, there are way too many smart or skilled people chasing too few supporters/fans, to the point of underpricing the efforts of their labor.

We smart people can always hire other serfs. ;)

No, sorry. I agree everybody deserves to be treated with respect, but in my experience many people who talk the talk you talk do not walk the walk at all: if they get a chance to crush somebody smarter or more able than themselves many have no limits whatsoever (except avoiding practical consequences to themselves)...

The thing with people like Feynman who are driven by curiosity is that they are not always “super nice”, but they get no joy out of ridiculing or humiliating other people, the way a lot of “small people” do, unfortunately. I’d much prefer being teased by Feynman than being verbally abused by some of the power and money hungry mediocre people I’ve come across.

Quite. Much of the cult status of Feynman was created by the man himself. He had several books written espousing his genius. As for his charm - salesmen are charming, psychopaths are charming. Charm is a 5 letter word for manipulative, as many of his colleagues wives discovered.

Your cynicism is off the charts.

Paying attention to people, listening to them carefully, answering questions and explaining things clearly, talking to them as equals instead of patronizing, etc. is not inherently “manipulative” or “psychopathic”.

The book 'Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman' by James Gleick is very balanced. Anyone that has read Surely You're Joking should also read Genius before they start their career.

Charming people are charming.

The word is just a shorthand for people who are able to express themselves in a way that puts other people at ease and engenders a positive emotional state.

It’s pretty much an unmitigated positive trait. Like any positive trait it can be paired with all sorts of other characteristics positive or negative.

But there’s really just nothing wrong with being charming, and no moral authority that derives from not being so.

Perhaps it's neither a positive nor a negative trait, but rather a power with which comes the responsibility to use it for positive purposes?

I just finished reading _Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!_ and I agree - the word that described most of his stories to me was "boastful". Most of his stories involve him being more clever than everyone else around him, rather pointedly.

However, whenever he talks about getting recruited or being tasked with something important, he always claimed to be astonished that anyone thought "little Feynman" worthy of such a high task. I take him at his word that this was his reaction.

I'm not sure what to make of this.

I'll add that though his bragging felt a little distasteful to me, I greatly enjoyed the tales and deeply appreciated his honesty and forthrightness about his life (including aspects I find less savory, like womanizing).

I'd absolutely recommend the book, but perhaps try _The Feynman Tapes_ on audiobook if possible because they're the recordings of his own speech that was written down and became the book.

>Most of his stories involve him being more clever than everyone else around him, rather pointedly.

Well, what would you have expected him to write? He was more clever than everyone around him in virtually every room he was in, for his whole life. Usain Bolt's biography would not have very many stories about the times he was outrun by people. Feynman had a healthy attitude about assigned-at-birth characteristics, he didn't deny them, but he didn't let them make him insufferable either.

That certainly wasn't the case in the Manhattan project.

Nonetheless, I see your point - most of the time, the alternative would have been to simply not tell the story, and I'm glad these stories were told.

I remember reading that people who are insecure about something, criticize or make fun others having that quality to feel better about themselves.

If this is true, then maybe Feynman really was insecure about his intelligence ("humble"), and his "boastful" stories were to make him feel better about himself and to cover up this insecurity.

(I am not a psychologist, so I can be completely wrong here.)

I think over the course of his life he became more confident as accolades and successes grew

I think you do him a disservice when you quote it out of context. “You met me at the peak of my career when I seemed to you to be concerned with problems close to the gods.“ doesn’t read like hubris to me, in fact it kind of reads like to opposite. A professor does seem impressive to his students, and Feynman points out its even at the hight of his career which is where he would have appeared the most impressive.

I think that goes well with the encouraging message of finding your place in the world, because you need it to progress.

>> One has to look out at the world and, taking in the successful and unsuccessful, conclude that some ego about oneself might be more or less required for success.

Well, if you don't think you pack a punch or can take a beating, you don't throw your hat into the ring.

The problem is always to know how to strike a balance- believe in yourself, know what you can achieve, but don't become an overblown bag of farts. Why? Because obviously nobody can stand knowing they're an overblown bag of farts, so if someone is, they don't know the first thing: who they are.

Socrates, the wisest of men, knew how to get out of this one. "I know one thing, and I know it well: I know nothing at all", he said [1]. And, he said, "know thyself" [2].

A scientist is driven by what she doesn't know, and wishes to know. But she must know the immensity of the task, lest she become an idiot who thinks she knows and knows nothing, John Snow.

________

[1] my liberal translation of his laconic "εν οίδα οτι ουδέν οίδα", "I know one thing, that I know no thing".

[2] "Γνώθι σαυτόν".

Quoting Ernest Becker from his The Denial of Death:

"In man a working level of narcissism is inseparable from self-esteem, from a basic sense of self-worth. His sense of self-worth is constituted symbolically, his cherished narcissism feeds on symbols, on an abstract idea of his own worth, an idea composed of words, sounds and images, in the air, in the mind, on paper."

"It is natural for a man to strive to be a hero, it goes deeply in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, and yet the society gets chills when someone admits the honesty of it."

I got the opposite impression regarding the list. To me it seemed to be trying to illustrate that he was not always working on grand ideas (one of them was a theory of how to fold paper to make a children's toy, after all).

Ego is important because it allows you to seriously attempt problems that many people would consider beyond them.

If you genuinely believe that you can achieve something, you might be willing to sink many months of nonstop work into it despite zero tangible progress. Someone without that ego may not have the tolerance to last that long without progress while still believing it's a good use of time.

> Ego is important because it allows you to seriously attempt problems that many people would consider beyond them.

This implies that a lack of ego will prevent you from attempting the same thing.

One doesn't need ego to have a healthy awareness of how significant factors like self-discipline, timing, opportunity, privilege, access to resources, and myriad others can be when it comes to success.

Ego probably helps in cases where the investment of time and effort is irrational. Of course, for most people, that's not really 'helping' at all, since they end up investing too much time and effort in hopeless projects. But I guess a few egotistical people luck out and succeed at something which they had very little chance of succeeding at.

This is the definition of start-up culture :)

You filleted the quote. He said.

> You met me at the peak of my career when I seemed to you to be concerned with problems close to the gods.

This is not ego

Indeed - "seemed to you". Most the discussion is a bit silly.

Some people can't escape "crab bucket" mentality, and have to tear down people who've worked hard to do great things. Perhaps it's unsurprising that those people post in online forums to take cheap shots at dead people.

> Too many engineers eschew ego

I'd like to work wherever you do. ;x

Maybe you just don't notice the ones who eschew ego? After all, that's precisely the conundrum here.

He had a gargantuan ego... and gargantuan accomplishments to back it up. The Michael Jordan of late 20th century physics, in more ways than one.

"Michael Jordan is the Richard Feynman of late 20th century sports." (Sorry, couldn't resist.. :)

True, it's inflated ego which is a problem. From what I've read about Feynman, I doubt his ego was inflated.

Indeed - if anything his ego was _accurate_ - he correctly thought of himself as the smartest in the room. The question is, did his success lead to his ego, or did his ego lead to his success? I certainly do not mean to defame him - I practically worship Feynman - I've just been exploring the idea that a little bit of ego can really aid in accomplishing big tasks.

One of the earliest stories of his career was breaking into people's offices at Los Alamos and picking their safes to get access to their Manhattan project reports when he was impatient and didn't want to wait for them. I think he's had a healthy does of ego right from the beginning.

Feynman's beginning was very early. Before he joined the Manhattan Project he had already published work that appears in textbooks today.

What you call who I call a healthy disrespect for bad rules that impede people trying to get real work done.

"I was working on problems close to the gods"

He’s saying that he’s working on the important stuff, figuring out how the universe works.

I imagine he was simply trying to be poetic.

I think you misread this because he certainly did not say or imply "I was working on problems close to the gods", in fact the phrase he used was "when I seemed to you to be concerned with problems close to the gods", meaning that others considered the things he worked on as being "close to the gods" only because they did not understand them at the same level he did - his list of experiments/problems was about how mundane the problems he was solving actually were. It did not read as him having much of an ego. Most of the problems he worked on have little to no impact on society or people's daily lives, most people still have never even heard of Feynman, and he knew most people wouldn't. That's not ego. If Feynman did have any ego it came from the pleasure he got from living an interesting life, not by how smart he was compared to the rest of humanity.

> Most of the problems he worked on have little to no impact on society or people's daily lives

Only because he solved so many problems that his side work is more substantial than most successful people's careers.

"Physicist Richard Feynman helped create the atomic bomb, shared a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics, and helped to figure out the source of the space shuttle Challenger explosion" -+livescience.com

Ego is necessary to protect a rather fragile flame of intelligence. When the flame becomes stable, the ego can be discarded. Some do, and in case of Feynman, if he did that, he would be called St. Richard; while some choose to turn their ego into a blast furnace, so the fire would turn inwards.

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