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Not sure how Nobel prize got on your list.

I read it that way:

- Things become taxing when they stop being fun

- Doing fun things and playing around whatever interests you is the way to make things less taxing

- Sometimes things you play with are also useful to others

Although I am not sure if it is always possible to match what you are getting paid for to what you consider being fun. Feynman gives no answer for this.

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To clarify, the Nobel prize comment is a reference to the last sentence of the passage: "The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate."

I understand. I just wanted to point out that pattern does not seem to have Nobel/etc reward built into it, neither it is a strategy to achieve something other than having fun and discovering random things that interest you. Everything else is coincidental.

You might easily end up living on the street by applying that strategy.

On the other hand, some of the best results I ever got professionally were coming from that exact state of play that Feynman describes.

That would seem to be why they asked how repeatable the pattern was, in a tone heavily implying the answer was "not very".

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