I picked up this book after overhearing Ryan Holiday mention it to Morgan Housel during their bookshop tour. I finished my first semester of law school on Thursday, and woke up Friday morning waiting to read a "fun" book. So, naturally, I picked one about Richard Feynman.

This one didn't disappoint, but it was different. The description explains:

Though [sic] a series of fascinating exchanges, Mlodinow and Feynman delve into the nature of science, creativity, love mathematics, happiness, God, art, pleasures and ambition, producing a moving portrait of a friendship and an affecting account of Feynman’s final creative years.

I was expecting a book with stories and conversations like Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, but from the perspective of a third person. Instead, it was a few of those conversations, but interspersed between explanations of quantum chromodynamics, the author's exploration of his imposter syndrome, his weed-smoking roommate, and Murray Gell-Mann.

Anyway, it was a fun read and there were a few good anecdotes. The "theme" of the book is, essentially, "follow your passion." The author, Mlodinow, first arrives at Cal Tech confused and lost. He believes he doesn't belong among the faculty, and has no idea what to pursue next. Amidst that struggle, he finds Feynman in around the campus doing and saying the things that Feynman did and said. Through their conversations, it seems like Feynman opened Mlodinow's eyes up and mad him see that, yes, he loves physics and math, but maybe that doesn't mean a career in academia. As the frustration builds, Mlodinow decided to start writing a screen play. An old professor ridicules him for this, but Feynman encourages it. He sees writing, especially fiction, as an exercise of the most important human trait: imagination. Mlodinow decides to pursue it, and the book ends explaining that Mlodinow wrote episodes for Stark Trek.

Here are my highlights and notes:

When they first met, Mlodinow expressed his concerns about whether or not he was where he should be. He recounts:

He was speaking to the point that had bothered me most—did I have that something special that it takes to be a scientist? Feynman said: Don’t think it is so different, being a scientist. The average person is not so far away from a scientist. He may be far away from an artist or poet or something, but I doubt that too. I think in the normal common sense of everyday life that there is a lot of the kind of thinking that scientists do. Everyone puts together in ordinary life certain things to come to conclusions about the ordinary world. They make things that weren’t there, such as drawings, such as writing, such as scientific theories. Is there something common in the process? I don’t see such a big difference between that and the scientist’s work.

On the difference between worrying and thinking:

Scientists do think in a constructive way. You ask a scientist some question and it worries him. He doesn’t worry in the sense that a normal person sometimes worries, like “I wonder if this sick person is going to get better.” That’s not thinking, that is just worrying. The scientist tries to build something up. Not just to worry about something, but to think something out.

Great scientists don't "do" anything special; they just do a lot more of something than normal people do: imagine.

Really all we do is a hell of a lot more of one particular kind of thing that is normal and ordinary! People do have imagination, they just don’t work on it as long. Creativity is done by everybody, it’s just that scientists do more of it. What isn’t ordinary is to do it so intensively that all this experience is piled up for all these years on the same limited subject. A scientist’s work is normal activities of humans carried out to a fault, in a very exaggerated form. Ordinary people don’t do it as often, or, as I do, think about the same problem every day. Only idiots like me do that! Or Darwin, or somebody who worries about the same question. “Where do the animals come from?” Or, “What is the relation of species?” A scientist works on it, and thinks about it for years! What I do, is something that common people often do, but so much more that it looks crazy! But it’s trying to find the potentiality as a human being.

In other words, the "greats" just do the ordinary, more.

For example, neither you nor I have muscles that stand way out on our arms like these fabulous guys. For us that would be impossible. Well they work and they work and they work on it. In that case, it might be a fault. How big can you make those muscles? How can you make the chest look great? They try to find out how far you can go. And therefore, they do something with an intensity that is out of the ordinary. It doesn’t mean that we never lift weights. All they do is lift weights more. But, like us, they’re trying to find the greatest potentiality of human beings’ activity in a certain direction. The scientist as a brain jock? Did I believe him? Is creative genius a form of synaptic sweat?

When you're solving a hard problem, you have to believe that you have something that other people don't. Some gift, some perspective, etc.

The next psychological aspect is, I have to think that I have some kind of inside track on this problem. That is, I have some sort of talent that the other guys aren’t using, or some way of looking, and they are being foolish not to notice this wonderful way to look at it. I have to think I have a little bit better chance than the other guys, for some reason. I know in my heart that it is likely that the reason is false, and likely the particular attitude I’m taking with it was thought of by others. I don’t care; I fool myself into thinking I have an extra chance. That I have something to contribute. Otherwise I may as well wait for him to do it, whoever it is.

And:

“I’m not telling him not to work on something new,” Feynman said. Then he looked at me and said, “I’m just saying, whatever you choose to work on, be your own worst critic. And then don’t do it for the wrong reasons. Don’t do it unless you really believe. Because if it doesn’t work out, you could end up wasting a lot of time.”

And what other people think is irrelevant. Sometimes.

“Let me ask you something,” I finally said. “Do you think it would be wise to work on a theory that almost everyone else thinks is nonsense?” “Only under one condition,” he said. “And what is that?” “That you don’t think it is nonsense.” “I’m not sure I know enough to tell.” He chuckled. “Maybe if you knew enough to tell, you wouldn’t work on it, either.” “You mean maybe I’m too dumb to know better.” “Not necessarily. Maybe you just don’t know enough, or haven’t known it long enough, to be spoiled by what you know. Too much education can cause trouble.”

Some good quotes from Mlodinow on imagination and preparation:

For instance, Tschaikovsky wrote, “The germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly. If the soil is ready . . .” And Mary Shelley: “Invention does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” And Stephen Spender: “There is nothing we imagine which we do not already know. And our ability to imagine is our ability to remember what we have already once experienced and to apply it to some different situation.”

Feynman loved nature, but unlike some, he was okay with there not being a unified "theory of everything." Feynman's view, which I like, was essentially who the hell are we to tell nature how it should behave.

“I don’t want anything. Nature has nothing to do with what I want! How do you know there’s one unified theory? Maybe there’s four theories! Maybe there’s a theory for each force! I don’t know. I don’t tell nature what to do. Nature tells me. This whole discussion is pointless! It’s getting on my nerves! I told you—I don’t want to talk about string theory!”

I liked this passage:

Back then, I did not know the answer. Today, as the father of two young children, I recognize the attraction. Even after the ups and downs of the fifty or so years of adulthood, even in the process of dying, Feynman was still a child. Fresh, gleeful, playful, mischievous, curious . . . IN-ter-ES-ted. Add a few hairs, subtract a few wrinkles, give him his health, and you’d have the same Feynman who yelled fake curses in made-up Italian to scold offending drivers in Brooklyn fifty years earlier. Hanging around a grown kid like Feynman made you question things. Like all the things we do in life because we have to do them—or at least we think we do. Sitting through boring meetings with colleagues or customers or clients when we’d rather be outside staring at a rainbow, or managing our careers along some path for which we have no passion merely because it is supposed to be the road to success. Like my young boys today, Feynman was startlingly honest with people, including himself, and you couldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to do, at least not without grumbling. In contrast, there I was, still free to choose my own path, and I was compromising almost before I began. What, for me, was worth doing? What would give meaning to my life? Was it string theory? Lattice theory? Or was it simply “fitting in” at a place like Caltech?

On Feynman's motivation for being a scientist:

I can say I am a scientist. I find excitement in discovery. The excitement is not in the fact that you’ve created something, but that you’ve found something beautiful that’s always been there. So scientific stuff affects every part of my life. And affects my attitudes toward many things. I can’t say which is the cart and which is the horse. Because I’m an integrated person and I can’t tell you whether for instance my skepticism is the reason I’m interested in science or my science is the reason I’m skeptical. Those things are impossible. But I want to know what is true. That is why I look into things. To see and to find out what is going on.

Most of the time, you want to think rationally; some of the times, you don't.

I’ll tell you a story. When I was thirteen I met a girl, Arlene. Arlene was my first girlfriend. We went together for many years, at first not so seriously, then more seriously. We fell in love. When I was nineteen we got engaged, and when I was twenty-six we got married. I loved her very deeply. We grew up together. I changed her by imparting to her my point of view, my rationality. She changed me. She helped me a lot. She taught me that one has to be irrational sometimes. That doesn’t mean stupid, it just means that there are occasions, situations, you should think about, and others you shouldn’t.

Something I've thought about while learning about programming and the law:

For him [Feynman] satisfaction in discovery was there even if what you discover was already known by others. It was there even if all you are doing is re-deriving someone else’s result your own way. And it was there even if your creativity is in playing with your child. It was self-satisfaction. Feynman’s focus was internal, and his internal focus gave him freedom.

There may be a few people in this generation who discover something truly "new." Most of us, though, will not have that luck. But, we can discover things that are "new" to us. I think that's why I like learning and reading so much. When I learn something I didn't know before, I'm not merely cramming my head full of names, dates, and facts; I'm discovering part of our history and part of the world that I didn't know existed.

This was the cool thing about coding. Every engineer working at any tech company in the world knows how functions work. But when I first discovered how functions work for myself, I was mesmerized. I felt like I unlocked a whole new world.

Learning = discovering for yourself something somebody else already knows.

Throughout the entire book, Mlodinow is chasing Feynman's approval. (And for good reason. We probably all would have if we were in his shoes.) But then, at the end of the book, he realizes the lesson that Feynman had been trying to teach him the whole time: it's not what Feynman thinks, it's what Mlodinow thinks.

And whether I continued to write as a hobby, or ever supported myself with it, I hoped that maybe someday I’d write something that Feynman would admire. And then I thought, no, even better, I hope that someday I will write something that I will admire.

A lesson from Feynman's life, and something good to aim for.

For Richard Feynman always knew how to get the most out of what the world had to offer, and how to get the most out of the talent with which God—or mere genetics—had blessed him. That’s all we can hope for in life, and in the years since he’s passed on, I’ve found it to be a valuable lesson.