PART 1 Energise CHAPTER PLAY On paper, everything about Professor Richard Feynman's career looked perfect. Aged just twenty-seven, he was already being hailed as one of the greatest physicists of his generation - the man most likely to work out how to harness the potential of nuclear energy. Now he'd been appointed one of the youngest professors at Cornell University in upstate New York. There was just one problem. He was bored of physics. The issue had started in the mid-1940s. Every time he sat down to think, he just felt tired. It had begun when Feynman's wife, Arline, died of tuberculosis in June 1945, months before the end of World War Two in America. After her death, all the music in the young professor's life faded away. The ideas that had so animated him as a doctoral student felt dull and flat. Even though he was good at teaching, it felt like a bore and a chore. 'I had simply burned myself out, 'he later recalled. 'I' d go over to the library a lot and read through the Arabian Nights,' he wrote. 'But when it came time to do some research, I couldn't get to work. I was not interested.' It was pretty easy doing nothing, he found. He still liked teaching undergraduates, sitting in the library reading and wandering around campus. He just didn't like working. Easy enough. By the late 1940s, Feynman had reconciled himself to a new identity: a physics professor who didn't do any physics. Until, one day, everything changed. A few years after his problems started, Feynman was sitting in the university cafeteria, alone, opposite a group of students. One of them was repeatedly throwing a plate up in the air. Feynman noticed something odd. While the plate was airborne, it wobbled. But the Cornell logo inscribed on the plate seemed to wobble faster than the plate itself. Curious, Feynman thought. But not exactly Nobel Prize-worthy. He was the man who had helped crack the code of nuclear fission; he wasn't supposed to be theorizing the characteristics of airborne crockery. But this moment of curiosity sparked a minor epiphany. He began to reflect on what had drawn him to his subject in the first place. 'I used to enjoy doing physics,' he later recollected. 'Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing - it didn't have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with.' Credit and Disclaimer This text is from Feel Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal, shared only for typing practice. Please support the author by purchasing the book if you find the content valuable. All rights remain with the author and publisher. Thankyou!