I just got back from an amazing two days at the 2017 U.S. Open tennis tournament in Flushing Meadows, NY. Through those two days — although one day was rained out — I got to watch a huge amount of excellent tennis. Here are some extremely quick thoughts from just a few of the matches that I watched:
Month: August 2017
Two more timeless lessons from Richard Feynman, this time by way of his book, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.
Don’t fool yourself
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” (212)
Let’s look at the bird
“[A]ll the kids were playing in the field and one kid said to me, ‘See that bird, what kind of bird is that?’ And I said, ‘I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of bird it is.’ He says, ‘It’s a brown throated thrush,’ or something, ‘Your father doesn’t tell you anything.’
But it was the opposite: my father had taught me. Looking at a bird he says, ‘Do you know what that bird is? It’s a brown throated thrush; but in Portuguese it’s a … in Italian a …,’ he says, ‘in Chinese it’s a …, in Japanese a …,’ et cetera. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘you know in all the languages you want to know what the name of that bird is and when you’ve finished with that,’ he says, ‘you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You only know about humans in different places and what they call the bird.’
‘Now,’ he says, ‘let’s look at the bird.’” (4)