

The Feynman Method to be a Genius - sanj

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!”
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RiderOfGiraffes
Hamming 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>

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nathanb
The 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.

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DennisP
This is my excuse for browsing HN all day instead of working. Just being a
genius!

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mathgladiator
I hope you are working towards being effective. I did, and my job basically
became read HN for 4+ hours a day.

~~~
DennisP
Yeah it's a lot easier keeping up with the day job these days.

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sanj
Found in Rota's lessons, here:
<http://www.math.tamu.edu/~cyan/Rota/tenlesses.pdf>

