Into the Impossible- Think like a Nobel Prize Winner

This book was pretty good. It was a quick read, I think I read it in less than a week. It helped humanize really smart people. Well I’m sure they wouldn’t call themselves really smart, I’m sure they would call themselves regular smart, but compared to the average person, they are really smart. I had a few key takeaways from this books.

Takeaways

Curiosity is king. If you aren’t curious about how something works, don’t expect to learn how it works. Staying curious about something helps you enjoy that thing. When you enjoy that thing, you are able to learn more about it and grow. That joy or spark in something helps you stick with something and grow until you are at expert level. A quote from the book talks about this, it’s from Andrew Riess when he said “I would pursue it as long as it was fun and interesting.” Referring to the field of science he was working in.

Another takeaway is that these people aren’t pursuing a prize or prestige. They are simply trying to solve problems or see why something works. Most of these people worked on the project that helped them earn the Nobel Prize, and immediately started on their next project. It was cool to read about. These people simply want to build, make, solve, etc. Rewards and accolades might come, but that isn’t the core driving factor.

They also worked with people who we would consider adversarial. If we think of the Nobel Prize as the end goal, science is a zero sum game. Someone wins and someone doesn’t. But these scientist aren’t like that. If you think of making progress as the goal, then the work isn’t a zero sum game. That is good news because you can make actual progress towards your goals if you don’t think of them as a zero sum game.

Quotes

In no particular order, here are some quotes that I thought were interesting from the book.

Succeeding is not the goal of the experiment. Learning is.

It is the advice I give to everybody, but I give it to myself also: if it isn’t fun, get out of it.

Often, we have this notion that you have to literally wait for genius to strike. But in reality, you can open the door to genius by relentlessly preparing.

Obviously not exhaustive. I mostly thought these quotes were worth noting because they helped show the thought process for these

Verdict

I would read this book. It’s a short read, and at the very least, humanizes the intellectual elite. It doesn’t show you what to think, or what to study to be like them. It simply shows you a behind the curtain look at them so you can see how they work.