What do you know?

How do you know the things you know?

Could there be a better way to know, and how could you find it out?

What don’t you know, and how might you learn?

Could you be wrong, and what would that look like?

What IS, and what faculties do you have to perceive and understand it?

These are the sorts of questions that most of us seldom get around to asking.

Epistemology is the field of inquiry that asks about inquiry itself, and questions the limits, characteristics, and sources of our knowledge.

Being able to think about how we are thinking, and know more about the process of accumulating knowledge about the world, requires a mindset shift all its own.

Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman is one of the best-known and most-loved scientists of our time.

He was involved in the development of the atomic bomb and did pioneering work in nanotechnology, superfluidity, and quantum computing.

What made Feynman so relatable, however, was his ability to popularize his work, and his many books and autobiographies captured the public imagination and earned him a legacy in the public eye as the face of intellectual rigor, scientific progress, and the powers of the rational mind.

But there is not some special access to reality that is afforded to theoretical physicists alone—what made Feynman’s mindset and worldview so compelling was how he thought, not what he thought.

In other words, he was consistently led to ask himself about what he knew, how he knew it, and how he could do better and learn more.

This is precisely what this book is about.

Using the inimitable Feynman as our guide and inspiration, we will peer beyond the realm of physics and engage with the underlying nature of inquiry itself, and how we might become students of life, in the very broadest sense.

Whatever your vocation, skill set, expertise, special interest, or personal challenges, your life can be improved by learning to learn.

No matter if you are primarily concerned with personal relationships, your occupation, your life path in general, or the grand, overarching philosophical questions that have teased and taunted even the greatest minds, you cannot help but improve your situation by fine-tuning those intellectual faculties that have the sole job of orienting you in the universe and helping you make sense of it.

Consider this fine-tuning process a kind of meta-skill that is transferable to any area of life.

Learn how to observe, to synthesize information, to analyze, to create, to solve problems, to extract meaning, to ask questions and seek their answers—in other words, learning to think—and you will master yourself and your world to whatever extent is possible for a human being.

The ability to really think (and we will soon see how most of us have a complete misunderstanding of what thinking is) will never go out of fashion or lose its value.

Your brain is a tool that will inspire the elevated use of every other tool you encounter.

It’s the kind of tool that possesses a fascinating potential—the ability to change and adapt itself as needed.