Your intelligence cannot be measured by a number. It is defined by your willingness to learn, solve problems and try new things. You are more than just a number.
Unknown (often misattributed to Richard Feynman)
The meaning of the quote
In the early 1930s, a high school student in Far Rockaway, New York, took an IQ test and scored 125. It was a good score, but nothing that marked him out as special.
The student was Richard Feynman.
In 1939 he placed in the top 5 of the Putnam Competition, a math contest for college students across the US and Canada.
In 1965 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
His sister Joan scored 1 point higher on the IQ test and later joked to an interviewer that she was the smarter one.
The quote is often credited to Feynman, but there’s no record of it in his books or lectures. It spread after a science account on X named Prof. Feynman posted it in 2021, along with a line saying your skills count for more than your grades. Feynman’s own life still shows all 3 habits the quote names.
Learn
When Feynman was 15, he taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra and calculus.
A test measures what you know on one morning, but the willingness to learn is a choice you make again every day.
The Feynman Technique is a good place to start. It uses his habit of explaining ideas in plain words to find the parts you haven’t understood yet.
Solve problems
In the book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Feynman tells how at 11 or 12 he built a lab out of a wooden packing box and started fixing radios for people around him.
One man’s radio roared every time he switched it on, then went quiet once it warmed up. Feynman walked back and forth thinking while the man complained that he was supposed to be fixing the radio. Then Feynman reversed the order of the tubes, and the noise was gone.
The man got him more jobs and told everyone:
“He fixes radios by thinking!”
No IQ test was measuring that kind of problem-solving.
Try new things
In 1962, at 44, Feynman made a deal with his artist friend Jirayr Zorthian. The two kept arguing about art and science, so they agreed to swap lessons, physics for drawing. Feynman thought learning to draw would be impossible.
He kept practicing and drew for the rest of his life, signing his work with the pen name Ofey so nobody would buy a drawing for his famous name. People still bought them.
A Nobel Prize winner was willing to be bad at something new in his 40s.
Exercise
Most people carry a number from school around for years, like a grade, a test score or a class rank. Grab a pen and see what that number leaves out.
- Write down your number. Note the grade, score or rank you still remember and what you believed it said about you.
- List what the number missed. Under it, write 1 thing you learned, 1 problem you solved and 1 new thing you tried in the past year.
- Find your weakest line. The one that was hardest to fill points to the part of the quote you practice least. Pick 1 small step for it this week and do it.
The only IQ score on record for Feynman is still 125. The list of what he learned, solved and tried kept growing until he died in 1988.
Resources
- Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Book)
- Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (Book)
- The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Book)
- The Feynman Technique: How to learn anything (Article)
- The other side of Fixed vs Growth Mindset (Article)
- Richard Feynman (Wikipedia)
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