Monday, December 15, 2008

Richard Feynman - The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

People often ask me what my typical day looks like and how much time I spend studying the markets expecting some profound answer or to be blown away by how hard I work. The truth is I look at things I find interesting. Probably less than 50% of my time is directed directly at the market. Yet because of my love for the market, almost everything I do comes back to the market.

I looked at a random blog that I never looked at before and it had some random videos of an interview from many years ago of the late Richard Feynman, a famous physicist and Nobel Laureate. I started watching the videos and found them fascinating. Has nothing to do about investing but at the same time I find they have everything to do about investing. The production is called "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out." It is split up into 6 videos. The first three I found much more insightful than the second three. He talks about how his father taught him things and how he learned algebra which was much more different than the way most kids learned algebra. That he understood the ultimate goal of algebra was to figure out what x was not the process of figuring out what x was which is what the schools taught. In the videos he talks about doing things for the fun of it and the prize is not honors (he despises honors) but rather the pleasure of finding things out.

Anyway I recommend these videos.

http://manualofideas.com/blog/2008/12/learning_from_the_late_richard.html

Below is a paragraph on who Richard Feynman was from Wikipedia.

Richard Phillips Feynman (IPA: /ˈfaɪnmən/; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American physicist known for the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as work in particle physics (he proposed the parton model). For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman was a joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, together with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime and after his death, Feynman became one of the most publicly known scientists in the world.