Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!

Actionable Insights

• Increase your bias towards action instead of waiting for perfect moment.
• Take intelligent guesses, doesn't cost you anything.
• Be persistent and learn when not to be.

Highlights

He fixes radios by thinking!

I made my own fuses by taking tin foil and wrapping it around an old burnt-out fuse.

Two seconds later, bup-bup, he comes! So they all got excited about this, and I predicted a couple of other things. So I owned up to what it was, that I could here it upstrairs the hour before.

One day my cousin Francis and I sat Joan down and said that there was a special program she could listen to. Then we ran upstairs and we started to broadcast: "This is Uncle Don. We know a very nice little girl named Joan who lives on New Broadway; she's got a birthday coming - not today, but such-and-such. She's a cute girl." We sang a little song, and then we made music: "Deedle leet deet, doodle doodle loot doot; deedle deedle leet, doodle loot doot doo..." We went through the whole deal, and then we came downstairs: "how was it? Did you like the program?"

"It was good," she said, "but why did you make the music with your mouth?"

Yes, we know that, but we'd like you to come over anyway.

The main reason people hired me was the Depression. They didn't have any money to fix their radios, and they'd hear about this kid who would do it for less.

When a person has been negative to you, and then you do something like that, they're usually a hundred percent the other way, kind of to compensate.

Radio circuits were much easier to understand in those days because everything was out in the open.

I finally fixed it because I had, and still have, persistence.

I took a flying guess, and got it.

This happens more often then you'd like to believe.

Another thing I did in high school was to invent problems and theorems.

I realized then that if I'm going to talk to anybody else, I'll have to use the standard symbols, so I eventually gave up my own symbols.

String Beans

Coming soon..