Feynman and the Permission Nobody Actually Needs

Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, and you’d think that would be the headline of his life. It mostly isn’t, even to people who’ve read his books. What people remember is that he played bongos in a samba band, learned to pick locks and crack safes at Los Alamos as a hobby during the Manhattan Project, took up drawing in his forties just because a friend bet him he couldn’t, and once spent months trying to learn to perceive the inside of his own eyelids in detail. None of this advanced physics. He did it because he was a curious person, and curious people don’t usually check whether a thing is a good use of their time before doing it.

He wrote about why, eventually: “You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.”

Most of what stops you from doing the slightly ridiculous thing isn’t a real obstacle — it’s an imaginary committee in your head that was never actually convened.

The committee usually has opinions about dignity, about looking foolish in front of people who, statistically, are not paying nearly as much attention to you as the committee insists. Feynman’s secret wasn’t fearlessness — by his own account he worried plenty, about real things, like nuclear weapons and his first wife’s death. He just didn’t extend that worry to cover “what if people think it’s weird that I’m learning the bongos.” He’d already decided that wasn’t worry’s department.

You don’t need a Nobel Prize to get the same exemption. You just need to stop waiting for someone to grant it.