5 Powerful Study Tips From Richard Feynman
“Study hard what interests you the most.”
I have been writing about Richard Feynman for quite some time now and if you are reading this you probably already know this thing. One of the reasons why many of my articles are surrounded around the life and work of Richard Feynman is because he had a different, and quite interesting perspective towards life, love, science, teaching, and learning. The man was one hell of a character himself who feared no one.
When it comes to teaching and learning, Feynman was an exemplary personality. He was an impeccable student who taught himself advanced calculus and mastered it by the age of 15. He developed his own mathematical notations and symbols before he entered college. According to physicist Steve Hsu, Feynman was one of the highest scorers from the USA in the Putnam Mathematical Competition, which is one of the toughest math competitions in the world, and the Princeton entrance exams where he scored highest in physics and mathematics. The guy was hell of a genius!
As brilliant as he was as a student, he was an amazing teacher too. His capabilities to simplify complicated phenomena and explain them to general public in a simple and understandable way are not unknown to anyone. His lectures in physics, his literary writings, and recordings are perfect examples of his wit and clarity that he portrayed in his explanations. I have written several stories about the physicist that you can read in my previous publications and my Twitter handle. In this article, however, I shall explain five brilliant study tips that we all can learn from the late physicist. All the below mentioned quotes/lessons are extracted from his books, and interviews. These lessons are not just limited for people in academics but anyone in general who believes that learning is an eternal process.
“You’re unlikely to discover something new without a lot of practice on old stuff, but further, you should get a heck of a lot of fun out of working out funny relations and interesting things.”
This hold true in many areas of scientific and non-scientific disciplines. If you want to create something new, discover something new, you have to work yourself on all the pre-existing and pre-established stuff. In mathematics, for example, you cannot formulate a new theorem in any mathematical discipline without working on the previous ones.
“It is important to doubt and that the doubt is not a fearful thing, but a thing of great value.”
I don’t know about you people but I come from an academic background where we were just fed information rather than taught to create our own. We would just listen to what the teacher taught us and appear for exams. Creativity and questioning were something that lacked a lot during those times and still today it is seen in very few schools and colleges that students are taught how to think, and question, and doubt what they have been taught. They rather spend most of their academic life just listening and noting down the information given by the teacher. Doubt is a crucial element for creativity.
“No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.”
No problem is unsolvable. Every problem has a solution, be it an academic problem or a non-academic one. Reportedly, Feynman’s final blackboard at Caltech read “Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.” We often get demotivated when we try to solve problems and get no solution, we get frustrated and somehow don’t want to do it anymore. The idea is to fail better so that we can try better and get things done.
“If you can’t explain something to a first year student, then you haven’t really understood .”
There’s a popular learning technique named after Prof. Feynman. The central idea of the technique revolves around the ability of being able to explain stuff to people who are unfamiliar with the topic and finding one’s mistakes and correcting those mistakes by going back to the resource material. If you clearly understand something, you should be able to explain it to anyone in a way that they understand it. Feynman believed that teaching is a very powerful tool for learning things.
“The only way to deep happiness is to do something you love to the best of your ability.”
This doesn’t just apply to students, but to anyone and everyone. You don’t want to do something that you don’t enjoy doing. You don’t want to study something that you don’t enjoy studying. You don’t want to work on something you don’t enjoy working on. Ultimate happiness lies in doing something that you love. This is something that, I believe, not many people understand. If you don’t do what you love doing, you are doomed to failure and perhaps depression.
Feynman was an ultimate character when it comes to perspective on life, enjoying moments, teaching, learning, and happiness. He believed that one shouldn’t always rely on textbooks, the world itself is a big learning centre. You just need to go out and look around yourself. If cannot learn something completely if you do not involve yourself in it and education has no meaning if it is not applied for good.
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