Study hard what interests you the most in the most irreverent and original manner possible.
Richard Feynman
The meaning of the quote
At Los Alamos in the 1940s, a young physicist spent his spare evenings picking the locks on filing cabinets and cracking the combination safes that held the country’s atomic secrets, not to spy but just to see how the mechanisms worked, leaving notes inside the safes he opened so his colleagues would know he’d been there. That physicist was Richard Feynman, and the habit says more about how he thought than any lecture he gave.
Feynman wrote this quote in a 1965 letter to a student, later collected in Don’t You Have Time to Think?, a book of his letters put together by his daughter Michelle Feynman. He was answering someone who wanted to know how to get good at physics, and his answer had nothing to do with textbooks or timetables.
The quote splits into 2 demands, and both matter. Study what interests you the most, not what a syllabus or a career plan tells you to study. Then do it in the most irreverent and original way you can manage, meaning you stop treating the official method as sacred, take the subject apart, rebuild it your own way and argue back when it seems wrong.
This is close to what mindmapjournal.com calls the Feynman Technique, which Feynman himself used constantly. Explain the idea in plain words, find the exact spot where your explanation falls apart, then go fix that spot. It’s a disrespectful way to treat a subject, in the best sense, because instead of memorizing what an expert said, you’re taking the idea apart to see if it holds up.
Most of us do the opposite. We pick subjects because they look good on a resume, then study them the way we’re told to, with the textbook’s chapter order and the teacher’s approved method. Interest gets treated as a bonus, not a requirement. Feynman is arguing that this order is backward, and that the strange, side-door approach a truly curious person takes is usually the one that produces real understanding.
Action steps
The quote reads like a command, not an observation, so it’s worth turning into something concrete this week.
- Write down what you’d study if nobody was grading you.
Not the subject you think you should like. The one you go down internet rabbit holes about at 11pm. That gap between the two lists is usually where your real curiosity lives. - Break the official method on purpose.
Pick one thing you’re learning and explain it out loud in your own words, with no jargon, as if to a 10-year-old. Wherever you get stuck or start mumbling is the exact spot that needs more work, and now you know precisely what to study next instead of rereading the whole chapter. - Build something weird with it.
Don’t just read about the subject. Make a bad drawing of it, argue about it with a friend or apply it somewhere it wasn’t meant to go. Feynman got to the physics that won him a Nobel Prize by messing around with a spinning cafeteria plate that had nothing to do with any assignment.
About the author
In the late 1940s, Feynman sat in the Cornell University cafeteria and watched a student throw a plate in the air. As it spun, it wobbled, and the blue medallion painted on the plate seemed to rotate faster than the plate’s edge did. Nothing he was working on needed that fact, and he worked out the wobble’s physics anyway, purely because it was fun.
He’d spent the years right after World War II feeling burned out on physics, wondering whether he had anything left to give the field. As he put it in his memoir, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!:
“Physics disgusts me a little bit now.”
His fix wasn’t to push harder. It was to give himself permission to play with physics “whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever,” and the wobbling plate was the first thing he played with under that new rule.
That thread led to his Nobel Prize.
The wobble led him toward diagrams for describing how light and matter interact, work that became quantum electrodynamics. In 1965, Feynman won the Nobel Prize in Physics for it, sharing the award with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. He later said plainly that the diagrams which won him the prize came from that piddling around with the plate, not from any serious research plan.
Feynman had already made his name at 27 as one of the youngest scientists on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, where the safecracking happened alongside the physics.
He went on to write and teach The Feynman Lectures on Physics at Caltech, a course still used to teach undergraduates decades later.
Away from the blackboard, he taught himself to play the bongos well enough to perform, and he took up drawing seriously enough to sell paintings under the pseudonym “Ofey.”
In 1986, he joined the commission investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster and demonstrated, live on television, how a rubber O-ring lost its flexibility in ice water, a 30-second experiment that explained the accident more clearly than pages of testimony had.
Feynman died on February 15, 1988. The bestselling memoir he left behind, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, reads less like a physics book and more like a collection of stories from someone who refused to study anything the boring way.
Resources
- Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Book)
- Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick (Book)
- Don’t You Have Time to Think? (Book)
- Richard Feynman: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (YouTube)
- The Feynman Series: Curiosity (YouTube)
- The Feynman Technique: A 4-Step Method for Deeper Learning (Article)
- Richard Feynman (Wikipedia)
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