I stumbled on to a short TEDx video, where Danny Hills shares a couple of stories that he shared with the great Richard Feynman. You can watch the video here. This is a short 7 minute video and I would strongly recommend that you watch the video. If nothing else, you will atleast have a couple of laughs.
I am a big fan of Feynman, his work and most importantly, of him as a teacher. As a teacher, he had this uncanny ability to get to the level of understanding his students had about a subject and start taking the students with him to greater understanding of the subject that they were exploring together.
The first story is about how he got recruited to be the first officially hired employee for Thinking Machines. The story underscores how curious he was, always wanting to learn something that he didn’t know much about, always wanting to put in the hard work that doing something new requires. He had already won the Nobel prize, was considered to be one of the most famous minds of his generation, yet, he was curious enough and backed himself to learn new things.
When he is asked to do something not really thought through, the ability to cut through the crap and get to the bottom of things (this seems to be a problem not thought through) straight up was another learning for me.
We come across situations where, we know that the problem that we are being asked to work on is not really what is important or urgent, yet, how many times, we end up doing the work being asked instead of questioning it.
This ability to be humble yet smart enough to know baloney when we see it and the conviction to call it out, is super important for each one of us if we are to excel as leaders.
When confronted, Danny asked Feynman, the Nobel prize winning, world famous theoretical physicist, to go to a nearby shop and buy them some stationery and Feynman actually doing that task without much ado, talks to me of the humility of the man.
The second story is about his struggle with cancer and how he would still find ways to make jokes about his struggle with cancer. How he fooled around with the doctors and his approach to his struggle to cancer – “Sometimes I worry about dying soon too”.
This reminds me of something that I learnt from the book “The Art of Possibility” by Benjamin and Rosamund Zanders – Always follow Rule No. 6 – “Never take yourselves so goddamn seriously“. Richard Feynman always followed Rule No. 6.
In conclusion:
In conclusion, I would only say that some of the characteristics that almost all great leaders share is their humility, curiosity, the ability to see through things to what they really are about and an ability to not take things seriously but not too seriously. I would highly recommend that each leader read Feynman’s book – “Surely, you’re joking Mr. Feynman“, watch his lectures and interviews here. There is a lot to learn from this man’s life.
