Easily listen to The Science of Self in your podcast app of choice at https://bit.ly/ScienceOfSelfPodcast

00:00:58 Intrinsic Versus Extrinsic Motivation

00:09:41 Leveraging Intrinsic Motivation in Your Own Life

00:15:27 Twelve Favorite Problems

00:18:41 In his much-loved book On Writing, Steven King talks about new ideas

00:19:21 How to Generate Your Own Curiosity Engine

00:30:11 Isaac Newton

00:31:03 Pierre Curie

00:31:10 Nineteenth-century German chemist August Kekulé

00:31:21 Jack Parsons

00:34:35 The Feynman Notebook Method

00:36:58 James Gleick wrote in his biography, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

Hear it Here - https://adbl.co/3OsoIY1

• To think like a scientist, a person needs intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation comes from our own valuation of what’s important and meaningful, and a personal sense of satisfaction that comes with defining our own means and ends.

• Be honest and realistic with yourself about what genuinely inspires and motivates you. Evaluate your motivations and goals, reconnect to your passion in life, and consider the greater good you’d like to serve.

• Get into the habit of asking questions, and get comfortable with not knowing. Create your own “curiosity engine” by keeping a journal with your twelve favorite problems written in it. Always seek their solutions in everyday life. With a list of problems/questions, you give yourself a tool with which to face new challenges, and you bring your stress down and your feeling of control and mastery up. You increase your chances of making important connections and solving problems.

• Don’t be afraid to relax into the unintuitive, unconscious, or unexpected ways that new ideas and insights might arrive. Stay curious about what seems strange, unusual, or unexplained.

• To keep himself actively involved in the learning process and to improve his comprehension, Feynman kept a master notebook in which he listed the topics he lacked knowledge about. This kept him organized and focused.

• The most important part of Feynman’s notebook method is to explain the material to yourself as though you were teaching it to another student similar to you. Your ideal notebook will depend on the function you want it to serve.

#AleisterCrowleysOrdoTempliOrientis #AMoreBeautifulQuestion #CharlesRichet #Curie #CuriosityEngine #DavidHackettFischer #Extrinsic #Feynman #GianCarloRota #Guiana #Guyana #Hoberman #Intrinsic #JackParsons #JamesGleick #Jung #Kekulé #MarjorieCameron #NASAsJetPropulsionLab #TiagoForte #ForteLabs #NOTEBOOKOFTHINGS #PierreCurie #RichardFeynman #IntrinsicVersusExtrinsicMotivation #MentalModels #RichardPFeynman #WarrenBerger #RussellNewton #NewtonMG #PeterHollins #TheScienceofSelf #RichardFeynman’sMentalModels #PeterHollins

One could approach any knowledge-acquiring endeavor in life with the same attitude. Physics is a great-grandchild of the classical arts first described by the ancient philosophers, physicians, and naturalists. Though the material has changed over time, the spirit of inquiry (when done correctly!) remains unchanged. How does one live like a scientist? Today, the size of the mega-corporations running the global economy could convince us that science is the same as business, which is the same as technology. We might look at famous tech billionaires and assume that they are living some tale of heroism in which their innovations and intelligence are paving the way for the rest of humanity. Feynman would probably have disagreed very, very strongly with this!

When asked if he thought his own achievements in physics deserved the Nobel Prize, his response might have surprised many. He said, “I don’t think so. I don’t know anything about the Nobel Prize, I don’t understand what it’s all about or what’s worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that X, Y, or Z wins the Nobel Prize then so be it. I won’t have anything to do with the Nobel Prize... it’s a pain in the ... [laughs]. I don’t like honors. I’m appreciated for the work that I did and I’ve noticed that other physicists use my work. I don’t need anything else. I don’t think there’s any sense to anything else.

I don’t see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish Academy decides that this work is ‘Nobel’ enough to receive a prize. I’ve already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it. Those are the real things. The honors are unreal to me." What can we conclude given this response? The obvious thing is that Feynman didn’t do what he did in order to win accolades, to get famous, or even to make money. He didn’t do it to impress people or satisfy some deep psychological need for validation.

He didn’t do it to prove himself or to show off his intelligence. In fact, one almost senses that here, Feynman believes that something like the Nobel Prize is rather antithetical to his aims as a scientist. So, if the greatest accolade in scientific achievement was beside the point for him, then why did he do what he did? The answer is: he had his own intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is the name for the drive to do something that comes from within a person and their own desires. It’s in contrast with external motivation, which sees the reason for doing things as coming from outside the self and from other people or circumstances. Intrinsic motivation comes from our own valuation of what’s important and meaningful, and a personal sense of satisfaction that comes with defining our own means and ends. Extrinsic motivation can make a person just as effective, but that drive may come instead from things like praise, rewards, fame, accolades, public recognition, family pressure, cultural expectations, money, and so on.

Though a person who is intrinsically motivated may enjoy praise and find value in helping or inspiring others, their primary reason for doing anything is theirs and theirs alone. If you want to know what kind of motivation you have driving your own behavior, ask yourself what motivated you to read this book, or indeed what has motivated you to choose any current project you are engaged in. Why did you do it? This may seem obvious, but pause to really consider your honest answer. Do you have a genuine interest and fascination in the topic explored here? Have you read this far because you want to know more and are interested just for its own sake? Or did you pick up this book (or indeed embark on any other kind of project) because you suspected it might improve your life in some way, and that might help you earn more money or be a more likeable person? Did you hope that you could bolster your own feelings of mastery or intelligence?

Get a handle on some aspect of your life? Some people buy popular science books with the words “quantum physics” in big, bright fonts on the covers, partly because they just like how they feel whenever they glance at it: i.e., smart, important, and sure of themselves. They like to feel as though they are one of the smart ones, that they are sane, rational, and on the right side of things. The joy of the endeavor comes from someone else seeing the book and saying, “Wow, you’re reading that? Looks so complicated." When they sit down to read the book, however, they don’t get past Chapter 2. That’s because the joy of the book came from the recognition and validation that others supplied, and the feeling that one was seen to be embarking on a difficult, worthwhile, and admirable mission. When it comes to sitting down and actually embarking on that mission, though, there is not enough intrinsic motivation to power forward. So, we find an irony in the fact that a person who won a prize for excellence in physics was actually uninterested in the prize!

Likewise, we can imagine a shadow cohort of people who embarked on a similarly grand project but for external reasons, and who failed to achieve for that very reason. That said, being externally motivated is not always a bad thing. Some people have achieved impressive feats for all the wrong reasons: They were obsessed and hated feeling defeated by some challenge or unknown; they felt like they had something to prove to everyone; they were simply a little obsessed with a question that wouldn’t stop haunting them until an answer was found. However, in every case, intrinsic motivation is the surer, longer-lasting, and more powerful “fuel source” for real achievement—even if achievement is actually not its aim. If you are not sincerely interested in learning to write code, for example, then don’t force yourself because you think doing so will somehow make you a better, more accomplished person. Your vanity and ego may give you plenty of energy to get started, but once that fizzles out, the project will suddenly lose momentum. Not only will you fail to enjoy it, you will also be competing with people who are intrinsically motivated and therefore will always be more energized, more resilient, and more creative than you at the same tasks. Instead, be honest and realistic with yourself about what genuinely inspires and motivates you.

Feynman did physics because he wanted to. It gave him joy, purpose, and meaning. He was good at it, and it fit his skill set and temperament. One could imagine that even if he lived in a world where physics was never awarded any prizes, or one where it had little value to others, he would still do what he did. Because he would still derive meaning and value from his work in the same way, i.e., from within. Leveraging Intrinsic Motivation in Your Own Life Step 1: Honestly evaluate your motivations What goals do you currently have and why did you choose them? Why are certain activities set as priorities in your life? Let’s take a non-science example and imagine that you have signed up for a life drawing class.

You ask yourself why. Your motivations were kind of vague and ill-defined before, but you stop and try to put words to it. You discover a mix of things: You’re a bit bored lately and want the challenge; you feel like you have always had some artistic talent but feel guilty to have never capitalized on it and wonder if now’s the time; you find the thought of it quite exciting; finally, your friend just signed up and a secret part of you didn’t want to miss out. On closer inspection, you realize that this goal is about eighty percent driven by external motivators. If you took away the guilty feelings at not “living a creative life” and if your friend suddenly dropped out, you’d realize that you actually wouldn’t be as interested. You decide that you’d rather forgo the life drawing class and invest money and time into something that you actually are genuinely interested in. That leads us to the next step. Step 2: Seek out your true passion Find those things in your world that hold real meaning and value for you.

These are the things that you would be attracted to even if nobody else thought they were important, even if you didn’t get paid to do it (or it cost you to do it) and even if everything you achieved in that area was invisible to others. Many people believe that they do not have a passion—more likely it’s that other, external goals and values have been foisted on them for so long that they have forgotten what used to appeal to them. They may have had a lifetime of talking themselves out of projects and ideas that were “unrealistic” or not worth pursuing because they didn’t make money or win approval from others. For some, the heart’s true desire has been set aside because of the belief that they lack the talent necessary. This comes from a belief that we are only allowed to do things if we know we will excel in them. In other words, it’s that external motivation talking again! We might say, “I have always loved ballet, but I’m a size eighteen and thirty-six years old—I’m never going to be even half good at it, so there’s no point in even starting." We forfeit the sense of passion and wonder we might have had for that avenue of exploration and take up something else we think we should—but it doesn’t satisfy.

One great way to get in touch with what you’re truly excited by is to try to remember what caught your imagination when you were a child—i.e., before the external world came in and told you what was and wasn’t possible. What form did all your play take? What did you do spontaneously, just because it gave you pleasure? Give yourself permission to explore that again now. Finally, don’t believe that some people simply lack this passion—the birth right of every human being is a certain degree of passion and curiosity. Remember, you are not asking what you are good at, or what can make you money or impress others. You are merely asking about those corners of the universe that seem, and have always seemed, utterly fascinating to you. You may discover that what most appeals is something that works toward the greater good somehow.

Serving an end that is bigger than yourself can be extraordinarily motivating and empowering. Scientists the world over have often worked with a deep sense that their efforts, no matter how humble, are contributing in some way to the greater endeavors of humankind on the path of progress. For other scientists, there is a powerful spiritual element to their work and a reason to get up every morning that goes beyond the everyday challenges they’re trying to manage. Even those who appear to be driven by money may actually have a deeper desire at work—perhaps the yearning to create a legacy for their children, to build something of value for others, and to protect it. By regularly taking these two steps (i.e., asking what your motivation is and cross-referencing it against all that it could be), you are giving yourself the chance to transform extrinsic motivation into intrinsic. If you remove all the extrinsic rewards for something and discover you don’t care anymore, that’s a strong sign that the task is not one that genuinely speaks to your deeper passion. We all only have one life—why not devote it to the things you care about and that matter more than anything? On that path, you cannot help but be more effective, more able to grow, and more resilient.

But all these things will feel to you like happy side effects because you will have attained a deeper and more lasting satisfaction. Twelve Favorite Problems Have you ever noticed how little children are constantly asking why? Warren, Berger, author of A More Beautiful Question, claims that children ask an average offorty thousand different questions between the ages of two and five. That’s more than thirty-six novel questions a day, every day, for three years! To appreciate how big a deal that is, ask yourself how many questions you’ve asked so far today. Has it even been one? Adults don’t stop asking questions because they’re becoming wiser and figuring more things out. The world has not become less mysterious.

Rather, they have become less curious. Richard Feynman was an intelligent person, but perhaps his real skill was that he was a philomath—that is, someone who loves to learn. Now, our culture has a backward idea of what genius looks like. In popular media depictions, a genius is a rude know-it-all who easily and arrogantly solves problems that stump others, but this could not be further from the truth. Intelligent people don’t have fewer problems than the rest of us ... they have more! A genius is not someone who has figured everything out. Rather, they are people who positively relish problems. They live with a long and constant stream of questions they are eternally asking and seeking to answer.

They don’t resent these problems, and seek to solve them as soon as possible. Instead, they find them interesting and are able to hold on to them, file them away in their minds, and keep returning to them, not as problems at all but as cherished mysteries that may take their entire lives to digest and absorb. During a talk at MIT, mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota mentioned that Richard Feynman liked to say: “My approach to problem-solving is to carry around a dozen interesting problems, and a dozen interesting solutions to unrelated problems, and eventually, I’ll be able to make connections. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state." According to Feynman, “Every time you hear a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!’” Look for connections. Just because you don’t know the answer yet, it doesn’t mean the question isn’t worth asking again later, when you may know more.

Many people have discovered novel and complex solutions to problems precisely because they were able to synthesize a collection of ideas that nobody had till then thought to link together. In his much-loved book On Writing, Steven King talks about new ideas he would have for novels, explaining, “These were all situations which occurred to me while showering, while driving, while taking my daily walk and which I eventually turned into books. It’s that sudden flash of insight when you see how everything connects." But that connection can only happen if your unconscious mind has something to work on. Follow Feynman’s advice and you will always have a collection of problems on the go, and your brain will be always chewing over them, even when you’re asleep. How to Generate Your Own Curiosity Engine Pulitzer Prize–winning historian ​​David Hackett Fischer once said, “Questions are the engines of intellect—cerebral machines that convert curiosity into controlled inquiry." Start with questions. Your questions will help you create a mental prism through which every new piece of information is refracted.

This inbuilt filter focuses and collates your attention, makes an active agent in your own learning, and feeds off of itself—it is an engine, after all, and once it’s fired up, who knows where it will take you! With a list of problems/questions, you give yourself a tool with which to face new challenges, and you bring your stress down and your feeling of control and mastery up. You actively and joyfully engage with other people and their minds, accessing what they’ve created and building your attention and analytical powers. You put curiosity as the driving force in your life, not duty or boring old habit. You find patterns and solutions—or sometimes even better than solutions, you learn to ask bigger, smarter questions. Opportunities and possibilities unfold in front of you. Finding and nurturing this collection of problems and queries is a lifetime’s work and cannot be completed in an afternoon. But you can begin by deliberately carving out some quiet space in your world where you can contemplate and reflect.

The brain needs time and space to work—give yourself that gift by regularly taking a moment to just think, free of distractions. You might like to meditate, but it’s extremely useful to be able to also note down your thoughts in a journal or note-taking app. Use the following questions to guide your inquiry (even better if you can generate some questions of your own, naturally!): What were you most interested in as a child? What fascinated you most (you, too, asked forty thousand questions back then—what were they about?) •What topics and ideas have you always most enjoyed learning about? •Can you identify things that interest you but which also challenge you? •What fascinates you but you also don’t yet fully grasp? •Who do you admire and why?

•What are the biggest challenges facing you right now—not just in work or your field of expertise, but more generally? •What habits do you notice? What two areas of life do you see connecting up with one another? •What has always seemed strange to you about society? About nature? About the “way things are”? Can you use this to generate some burning questions? •If you had dinner with a wise and all-knowing entity whom you could ask any question, what question would you ask them?

As you explore these questions, remember that you are not asking them purely to get to the “right answer." They are exploratory. Notice which avenues of inquiry really excite you, then follow those. As you keep asking questions, try to refine your queries by asking things like: How can I ... ? What is ... ? What is the connection between X and Y? Why does X happen? What happens if ... ?

What does Y mean? What caused ... ? Basically, you want to try to narrow down broader categories into more specific questions. “What is the point of everything?” is, as you can guess, too broad a question—but it can certainly spawn many more focused ones, such as, “Why am I doing my work in this specific way every day?" Feynman was interested in knotty physics problems. What are you interested in? It could be practical concerns such as how you improve performance or increase profits. It could be more about your personal life and relationships, and have to do with subtler psychological problems.

It could be that you’re most interested in meaty philosophical questions about truth, meaning, knowledge, or ethics. Your question could be at one end of a problem (“What kind of work do I want to do?”) or at the other (“How can I learn to be even better at my current role?”). Whatever the case, questions will help you get closer. Once you’ve identified your twelve questions (it can be slightly more or less than twelve), then write them down concisely. You could even display the list somewhere you can see it daily. You’d be surprised how this simple act will start to change your perceptions. You may suddenly notice interesting threads everywhere, or meet people who are working on the same ideas that you are. When you are curious, you set off a whole chain of events in the world that could lead to interesting and unexpected places.

You’ll ask more questions, explore avenues you might have ignored previously, and in effect become a lightning rod for precisely the kind of material you are most passionate about. One day you might be reading a book on a topic you find interesting, let’s say the history of neurology and how humankind’s theories about the brain, nerves, and so on have changed over time. In the book the author briefly talks about fascia and its function in the body. You’ve never heard of fascia before, but it sounds interesting, so you dig a little deeper. You find a series of fascinating recorded lectures on the topic, and watch these, but as you do so, you are watching them through the filter of several other questions that are also on your list, primarily ones that concern the issue of chronic pain, of proprioception (the body’s ability to sense its orientation in space), and inflammation. Could there be a link between all these things, you wonder? You ask the question directly—do people who have chronic pain have irregularities within their fascia? You set about trying to find the answer and read a few studies and papers, learning more and more as you go.

In one paper, you find a fascinating anecdote about medieval medical practices that you hadn’t heard before. You file this away mentally—in five years’ time, you’ll remember it and it will help you make sense of a series of questions you haven’t thought to ask yet. But back to fascia: You read and read and become interested in how the body’s connective tissue stores trauma. Soon, you’re interested in the chemical bonds and molecule structures of the material making up the fascia, and want to know exactly what physical and mechanical properties it possesses that give fascia its unique characteristics. How exactly does fascia attach to the rest of the body? What is actually happening at a molecular level? Soon you are learning about the molecular structure of hyaluronic acid (and to understand that, you need to update your chemistry knowledge a little!). On and on you go.

On the surface, it appears that you are flitting from one topic to the other. But beneath the surface, your unconscious mind is busy at work synthesizing everything into a coherent whole. One day, when you’re out walking, you see a child playing with one of those multi-colored plastic balls that can shrink and grow. A little Googling tells you that it’s called a Hoberman square, and it allows for the creation of structures that, via the movement of scissor-like joints, can remain fully connected but expand and collapse through a wide range of movement. The question appears: Do fascia cells work like this? And what does that mean for nerves that are associated with this tissue? Could that cause chronic pain? The questions open a whole world of possibilities.

You learn that so-called “isokinetic” movement is characteristic of muscles, but what about the extracellular matrix and connective tissue? On and on you go, looking for links between geometry and physiology—you can’t say why, but you suspect they’re connected, and your mind keeps telling you to poke around until you find answers ... As you can see, this is far beyond having a question and simply seeking to answer it. You could have simply asked a physiotherapist, “Hey, can faulty fascia cause chronic pain?" and they may have said yes or no and that would have been the end of it. But the process described above goes well beyond that! You can probably also see that the process is iterative—the questions you ask influence the kind of data you are exposed to and focus on, and this in turn influences the kind of questions you ask. In a way, this process itself can become a form of scientific method.

You are constantly asking questions, making observations, adjusting your working model, asking questions again, seeing what changes, and so on. Science and Magic “From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena are, of course, in the new places, the places where the rules do not work—not the places where they do work! That is the way in which we discover new rules." —Richard P. Feynman Before we move on, let’s consider briefly that the process of constructing a “curiosity engine” made of questions may result in some very counterintuitive results. Though scientists are usually depicted as the pinnacle of sober rationality, the truth is that the world’s most distinguished minds had strong intuitive streaks that don’t undermine their work, but feed and support it. Isaac Newton was a devout Anglican and an alchemist and saw his work as heavily influenced both by the occult and his belief in a supernatural power governing the universe he sought to understand. Though this aspect of his career is seldom appreciated, Newton gave as much weight to astrology, numerology, and biblical mysticism as he did his mathematics—in fact, he saw them as belonging to the same bigger discipline.

Long before Feynman won his Nobel Prize, physiologist Charles Richet won his for his work on anaphylaxis ... but on his list of beloved problems were questions about psychic phenomena and how human beings could experience premonitions of things to come. Pierre Curie, physicist and husband of Marie Curie, was fascinated by mediums. Nineteenth-century German chemistAugust Kekulé said he had a breakthrough in visualizing the structure of benzene when he dreamed of a snake eating its own tail. Jack Parsons was a founding member of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and invented a kind of solid rocket fuel. He was also a follower of infamous occultist Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis, and claimed that he had once summoned the devil himself, who then fashioned the perfect woman in the form of artist and muse Marjorie Cameron. None of this is to make any claims about the legitimacy of these particular avenues of inquiry. Scientists, being human, have asked questions to which the answer is a resounding no, and they have made strange, faulty, or even backward connections and associations in their hunger for truth. And that’s as it should be!

It’s worth being aware that the unconscious mind usually puts together ideas in non-linear ways that more closely resemble artistic creation or Carl Jung’s synchronicity than “real science” conducted in a laboratory. Inspiration and that magical “Aha!” moment can come from unexpected quarters, and a true scientist is open to this mechanism, even if they don’t quite understand it at first. Many scientific problems have been resolved by people who were willing to keep looking at things that seemed irreconcilable, nonsensical, and even supernatural. After all, how many of the scientific phenomena that we take as resolved today were once seen more or less as magic? Today, the cutting edge of certain branches of theoretical physics makes no logical sense to most people, and seems bizarre and fantastical. In other words, if you hope to learn something truly new and push the very limits of your understanding, do not assume that there are some areas of knowledge, or some ways of knowing, that are “unscientific”—if you are doing science correctly and asking questions worthy of your interest, then you will discover that the world suddenly looks far, far stranger to you! Feynman once said, “Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry." Don’t be afraid to pull on one thread and see what happens ...

Let’s return to our example of fascia. After investigating this question for months or even years, you conclude that the New Age alternative therapists who claimed that “emotions can be stored in the body” may actually be right. You realize that molecules themselves possess a form of memory, and that the body’s tissues “remember” injury mechanically and in the way they aggregate at a cellular level. Once you realize this, it seems obvious—if neural cells in the brain have something to do with consciousness, why shouldn’t other cells? The Feynman Notebook Method Let’s imagine that Feynman’s list of twelve problems looked something like this: 1. How can we ​​measure the probability that a lump of uranium might explode too soon? 2. How can I accurately keep track of time in my head? 3. How can we design a large-scale computing system using only basic equipment? 4. How can I write a sentence in perfect handwritten Chinese script?

5. What is the unifying principle underlying light, radio, magnetism, and electricity? 6. How can I sustain a two-handed polyrhythm on the drums? 7. What are the most effective ways of teaching introductory physics concepts? 8. What is the smallest working machine that can be constructed? 9. How can I compute the emission of light from an excited atom? 10. What was the root cause of theChallengerSpace Shuttle disaster? 11.

How could the discoveries of nuclear physics be used to promote peace instead of war? 12. How can I keep doing important research with all the fame brought by the Nobel Prize? (Tiago Forte, ForteLabs.) Now, these are some pretty juicy questions (chances are, Feynman also kept a more mundane list of questions like are Guiana and Guyana the same place? And why does the toilet keep making that noise?) To keep himself actively involved in the learning process and to improve his comprehension, Feynman kept a master notebook in which he listed the topics he lacked knowledge about. He believed that putting ideas down in black and white, and in one’s own words, would help build clarity, direction, and memory.

Such a notebook primarily serves an organizing function and keeps many loose threads together. It is a repository of what has already been achieved, but also a collection of things still under review, and how they may connect to one another. James Gleick wrote in his biography, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman: “In preparing for his oral qualifying examination, a rite of passage for every graduate student, he chose not to study the outlines of known physics. Instead, he went up to MIT, where he could be alone, and opened a fresh notebook. On the title page he wrote: NOTEBOOK OF THINGS I DON’T KNOW ABOUT. For the first but not last time he reorganized his knowledge. He worked for weeks at disassembling each branch of physics, oiling the parts, and putting them back together, looking all the while for the raw edges and inconsistencies. He tried to find the essential kernels of each subject.

When he was done he had a notebook of which he was especially proud. It was not much use in preparing for the examination, as it turned out." The most important part of using Feynman’s notebook method is to explain the material to yourself as though you were teaching it to another student similar to you. Feynman was praised as an exemplary communicator, but this probably stemmed from the fact that he was so good at communicating his ideas to himself first. The more clearly and thoroughly you can elucidate an idea to yourself, the better you can understand it, and the more easily you will be able to share that understanding with others (we’ll dive deeper into this topic in Chapters 4 and 5). There is something powerful about translating your mental activities into something concrete that you can see. Your notebook will become a symbol for your learning, but also a way to track and monitor that learning and inspire you when you’re feeling aimless or stuck on a challenge. The more you work on your book, the more you are inspired to keep working on it and to keep investing your mental energy and effort into it.

When you were a child and attended school, you worked your way through a pre-formed curriculum. As an adult, your learner will have to be self-driven for the most part, and one of the greatest things you will have to learn is how to manage, organize, and motivate your own learning. The list of twelve questions is a great way to spark interest and begin a few fascinating fires. But at some point, you will need to continue to put fuel on that fire so that it keeps burning. Imagine that your self-learning vacillates between wide-eyed curiosity and joy, and deep, disciplined work. You ask the question in open-ended wonder, and then you get stuck into the real work required to understand things you don’t yet understand, and master things that are difficult for you. Then, you relax, pull back a little, and let the unconscious mind do its work—soon, you are filled up again with inspiration and curiosity, and the process begins anew. “You keep on learning and learning,” says Feynman, “and pretty soon you learn something no one has learned before."

Exactly how should you put your notebook together? Well, that’s up to you. The notebook is there to serve a purpose, so what it looks like will depend heavily on what that purpose is. What you want to do is treat your inquiries and processes with the greatest respect. Take time and care with them. If you have a spontaneous question, write it down. Give yourself enough time to ponder it, and write down the answers or any “leads” you have to potential answers. If you encounter a problem, note that down too.

Liberally use bullet points, mind maps, and diagrams to simplify, connect, and explain. Remember, as you teach yourself, you learn. Many theoretical physicists sit down with a pen and paper and literally talk themselves through a problem, saying out loud things like, “Right, so why am I having difficulty with this step here? Okay, let’s slow down and take it from the top. What assumptions am I making? There are these three things I don’t know. Okay. Let’s pause a moment and see if I can figure out a little more about at least one of these things before I proceed ... Damn, the same thing keeps happening.

How can I figure out why? I’ll try XYZ next and if that doesn’t work, then ... ” They are slowing down and deliberating through the mental process that all of us must go through to acquire deeper insight and understanding. They take nothing for granted. And they keep a record for everything. You might like to build in some leeway for reflecting on the learning process itself. What is helping and what isn’t? Organizing some kind of filing system for your ideas is not just an excuse to buy new stationery—it could literally be a precursor to how you mentally arrange and organize your arguments, experiments, and theories. A big skill is to be alert to what isn’t working.

Are you routinely discovering that you can’t put into words a particular idea? Feynman would say that this is evidence that you don’t really understand it, or that you are making a few unexamined assumptions. Great! The method is working—focus on those assumptions and you cannot help but learn. Other approaches you can incorporate: •Keep a glossary of terms at the back of the book. Every time you encounter a word that you don’t know the meaning of, look it up and find examples of how it’s used. Then write a definition for it in your glossary in your own words. If you’re lucky, one new word will keep leading to another!

•Have a system of symbols or color codes to help you see at a glance how material is organized. For areas of uncertainty or challenge, for example, you could use the color red or underline with a dashed line. Or you could get in the habit of drawing long vertical lines in the margins to mark areas of special importance. Whatever you decide, just keep it consistent. •Get used to creating summaries. At the end of every thinking or learning session, try to condense what you have covered in a single paragraph, image, or diagram. Be very clear about causal links. You want to feel that if someone were to stop you in the streets and ask where you were in your endeavors, you could tell them immediately, simply, and with only a few sentences.

If you don’t feel like that—keep focusing on the areas that still seem unclear. •Occasionally close the book and try to recall what you’ve read or written. This not only strengthens memory, but it forces your brain to engage with the material more directly. Blind spots will be a lot more obvious to you. What do you keep forgetting/overlooking and why? Could it be that there is an area of poor understanding? Focus on that. •Prime yourself.

Before just diving into something new, pause to ask yourself a few questions so that as you read, you are doing so actively and giving your mind a chance to filter, interpret, and collate. Before you take in any new material, orient yourself—who created it and why? Why are you reading it? How does it fit in with everything else you know? Note questions and prompts in the margin as you read, or even jot down counterarguments—as though you were literally talking to the text! •Make your learning personal. There’s no use trying to replicate a nice-looking journal style that belongs to someone else dealing with some other kind of problem. Your notebook is for you and should reflect your learning process, not someone else’s.

Use techniques, symbols, images, and organizing principles that make sense to you. Sometimes, the best methods are the ones you devise from scratch—no others will fit you better! •Finally, don’t get discouraged if you feel overwhelmed by the amount of material, confused about how to organize it, or disheartened by how difficult it is. Learning is hard. Even intelligent people have to push themselves through periods of frustration, confusion, and fatigue. If it were easy to understand, you would have done so already, right? Don’t take the difficulty of a task as proof that you shouldn’t attempt it. Just keep asking questions.

“What am I not understanding right now? How can I rephrase this in another way? Who can teach me this in a way I’ll understand? Where can I find an example?" Summary •To think like a scientist, a person needs intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation comes from our own valuation of what’s important and meaningful, and a personal sense of satisfaction that comes with defining our own means and ends. •Be honest and realistic with yourself about what genuinely inspires and motivates you. Evaluate your motivations and goals, reconnect to your passion in life, and consider the greater good you’d like to serve.

•Get into the habit of asking questions, and get comfortable with not knowing. Create your own “curiosity engine” by keeping a journal with your twelve favorite problems written in it. Always seek their solutions in everyday life. With a list of problems/questions, you give yourself a tool with which to face new challenges, and you bring your stress down and your feeling of control and mastery up. You increase your chances of making important connections and solving problems. •Don’t be afraid to relax into the unintuitive, unconscious, or unexpected ways that new ideas and insights might arrive. Stay curious about what seems strange, unusual, or unexplained. •To keep himself actively involved in the learning process and to improve his comprehension, Feynman kept a master notebook in which he listed the topics he lacked knowledge about.

This kept him organized and focused. •The most important part of Feynman’s notebook method is to explain the material to yourself as though you were teaching it to another student similar to you. Your ideal notebook will depend on the function you want it to serve. This episode of The Science of Self was brought to you by Newton Media Group. Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's show, head over to slash Peter Hollins to gain access to his free resource verses. We leave you today with the words of Warren Buffett be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.