This is an animated book review of: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character .

The Book: “Surely, you are joking Mr. Feynman?” is well-written, and easy-to-read. It is a conversation between Feynman and one of his friends. They not only give a deep picture about the upbringing, and the personality of Mr. Feynman, but also give an authentic description of scientific creativity and the process of discovery.

In this video I will present you the four main ideas of the book and the criticism of it.
Idea Number 1. Passion for Learning New Things
You should have your passions - but you should also have your hobbies. Feynman was of course passionate about Physics, but he was curious about everything he saw:
He joined a Brazilian Bongo group and took part on the annual competition at a street parade in Rio de Janeiro.
• He cracked safes in Los Alamos for fun during the Manhattan project
• He spent one of his summer holidays working under James Watson, the discoverer of the DNA
• He started drawing without any knowledge or experience, and became a hot commodity on the art market

This is also the basic principle of the school founded by Elon Musk, founder of Paypal and Tesla Motors. So if you are focusing strictly on one area in your life, you need a new hobby. Just look around and ask yourself how this or that works. And go and find out! Feynman was simply looking at a man playing around with a plate in a restaurant and later this experience helped him to understand how electrons work.

Idea Number 2. Failures of Education
Feynman spent years in Brazilian and had a chance to observe the Brazilian educational system. He concluded that many students were simply memorizing the curriculum, but had no understanding of the concepts they applied to.
Feynman’s approach was rooted in his upbringing what I already presented in my earlier video, making the topic exciting.
I am also very thankful to my parents that they brought up me, that I should challenge even the teachers in schools. And I recommend you the same, if your child’s teacher only inspire him to pass tests instead of teaching how to make sense of the world around them. In many cases the reason for this is, that the teacher is simply a bad pedagogue or he does not understand the subject himself.
And it is not unique for Brazilian, Feynman found the same chaos in California school system when he was asked to choose the text books from which students will learn. Most of the books were abounded with factual errors.
And some of the participants who were responsible for evaluating the books, not even read these, but valued the books randomly. And at the end the choice was made by low financial budget instead of the quality of the book.

This will lead us to Idea Number 3. Always question anything
When you were a kid, you also had a lot of faith in all sorts of things. Maybe you also thought that if an ‘expert’ said something, it must be true; if it was in television or in the newspapers, it must be true. But after meeting people in the ‘real world’ that illusion imploded: as the above mentioned example about the school system demonstrates, in many cases the world is run by people underqualified and overconfident.
How is it connected to the upbringing of your child? Feynman’s father was a uniform maker, so he often dealt with clients of all types of notoriety and he knew that underneath all those uniforms were just another naked ape.
So thanks to his pedagogical principle, Richard had no time for formalisms, rituals or societal views. He never took any data for granted and always questioned the sources even if these were published in prestigious scientific journals.
So for example if you believe that all geniuses have high IQ, and you don’t have a chance to bring up a genius child, I would like to ask you to question this belief as I did in my earlier video “Thy Myth of IQ”.
Idea Number 4 Simplify
What made Feynman a genius? For me, one of the major reasons is that he was capable of explaining the most complex of matters to a five-year-old. I feel how hard it is. I now have a 3 years old son and he already can ask wonderful questions. And in some cases I also don’t know the right answer to these basic questions, but I try to explain it to him that he is able to understand it. This is the same principle I described in my book review about Karl Witte.

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