I've been leafing through Richard Feynman's amusing Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!—a pseudo-memoir that's amusing, if a little slight, for the author being one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century.
But there are plenty of tasty nuggets sandwiched between silly, self-aggrandizing anecdotes. (There's a very brash, American 'tude to much of the book.)
The anecdote in question has to do with a mathematical process that Feynman self-taught from a textbook in high school. The process—and I won't bother getting into what it is, because I don't really get it and would only explain it wrong—ends up being incredibly useful over the years, because it's a different "tool" from the similar one that everyone else has. By virtue of learning from a non-standard textbook, Feynman seemed to have a magical power—when, in reality, he'd learned the same operation a different way.
Because he's not writing a self-help book, he doesn't get into any direct talk about building one's "toolkit"—it's all just luck from his point of view, anyway—but I started to wonder about what's in my own personal toolkit.
What "tools" do I have that others may not? What tools do I have that are similar but different—in a significant way—from those of others?
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