Estimated reading time: 2 minute(s).
Feynman Didn't Burn Out
Overview
When feeling burnt out, rekindle your passion by returning to the playful, curious mindset that originally sparked your interest. By exploring what genuinely fascinates and amuses you, free from external pressures, you may not only rejuvenate your enthusiasm but also achieve unexpected and significant breakthroughs.
Embracing Play to Overcome Burnout
Richard Feynman once experienced a period of burnout, feeling that he had lost his research potential. In his own words, he shares how he rekindled his passion for physics:
"Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I did whatever I felt like doing – not because it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but because it was interesting and amusing for me. In high school, I'd watch water running out of a faucet, growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determined that curve. It was easy to do. It wasn't important for science's future; someone else had already done it. But that didn't matter. I'd invent and play with things for my own entertainment."
Adopting a new attitude, Feynman decided to enjoy physics as he once did, free from the pressure of its importance:
"Now that I'm burned out and will never accomplish anything, I have this nice teaching position at the university which I enjoy. Just like reading the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics whenever I want, without worrying about its importance."
One day in the cafeteria, Feynman observed a wobbling plate and began to figure out its motion, discovering that the medallion on the plate rotated twice as fast as the wobble rate. This simple curiosity led him back into the realm of deep, theoretical physics:
"I went on to work out equations of wobbles, thought about electron orbits in relativity, the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics, and quantum electrodynamics. Before I knew it, I was playing – really working – with the same old problems I loved so much. It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. Like uncorking a bottle, everything flowed out effortlessly. There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate."