Richard Feynman’s Mental Models: How to Think, Learn, and Problem-Solve Like a Nobel Prize-Winning Polymath

By Peter Hollins

How a kid with a broken radio became one of the world's finest minds.
Richard Feynman started by fixing broken radios, and ended up being most known for helping invent the atomic bomb. He is the epitome of training your brain to peak performance.
Become an alternative thinker that can solve any problem and learn any technique.
Richard Feynman's Mental Models is a book about the various tools Feynman used to excel academically, professionally, scientifically, and later as a professor. Learn about this goldmine of innovation and understand how to become a lifelong learner and thinker yourself.
This is a book like no other - together, we will analyze the roots of Feynman's upbringing, the genesis of his most well-known mental models, and exactly how to apply them in all areas of your life. After all, he wasn't just a physicist, he was an artist, drummer, and lock-picker as well!
This book is exactly how to become a polymath with insatiable curiosity.
Peter Hollins has studied psychology and peak human performance for over a dozen years. This book represents the scientifically proven methods he has used to become an expert in multiple domains.
Build your intellectual horsepower - yes, it is possible!
- Feynman's 12 favorite problems framework and how to solve any area of your life
- the Feynman Technique and how to comprehend extremely complex concepts
- the virtues of play and imagination in solving problems
- intellectual humility and getting from Point A to Point B
-how to spark curiosity in all of your endeavors
The scientific mindset is the key to the next level of your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: May 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798394748172

Peter Hollins

Pete Hollins is a bestselling author and human psychology and behavior researcher. He is a dedicated student of the human condition. He possesses a BS and MA in psychology, and has worked with dozens of people from all walks of life. After working in private practice for years, he has turned his sights to writing and applying his years of education to help people improve their lives from the inside out. He enjoys hiking with his family, drinking craft beers, and attempting to paint. He is based in Seattle, Washington. To learn more about Hollins and his work, visit PeteHollins.com.

Book preview

Richard Feynman’s Mental Models:

How to Think, Learn, and Problem-Solve Like a Nobel Prize-Winning Polymath

By Peter Hollins,

Author and Researcher at petehollins.com

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< < CLICK HERE for your FREE 14-PAGE MINIBOOK: Human Nature Decoded: 9 Surprising Psychology Studies That Will Change the Way You Think. > >

--Subconscious Triggers

-- Emotional Intelligence

-- Influencing and Analyzing People

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Learning to See

Think Like a Martian

Feynman’s Advice: Play More!

The Scientific Method According to Feynman

Chapter 2: Live Like a Scientist

Intrinsic Versus Extrinsic Motivation

Twelve Favorite Problems

The Feynman Notebook Method

Chapter 3: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff

Intellectual Humility and the Socratic Rule

The Ordinary Language Test

The Power of Asking WHY

Chapter 4: Building Your Map of the World

How to Create Your Own Mental Model

Science is a Form of Imagination

How to Teach Like Feynman

Chapter 5: Putting it all Together

The Feynman Technique in a Nutshell

How to Visualize Your Data

Understanding the Hierarchy of Ideas

Summary Guide

Chapter 1: Learning to See

Keep your eyes wide open, approach everything with circumspection, don’t accept any truth without deep thought, expose and eradicate half truths and demagoguery, learn to wonder at the beauty of the world around you and, above all, think!—about everything.

—Richard Feynman

What do you know?

How do you know the things you know?

Could there be a better way to know, and how could you find it out?

What don’t you know, and how might you learn?

Could you be wrong, and what would that look like?

What IS, and what faculties do you have to perceive and understand it?

These are the sorts of questions that most of us seldom get around to asking. Epistemology is the field of inquiry that asks about inquiry itself, and questions the limits, characteristics, and sources of our knowledge. Being able to think about how we are thinking, and know more about the process of accumulating knowledge about the world, requires a mindset shift all its own.

Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman is one of the best-known and most-loved scientists of our time. He was involved in the development of the atomic bomb and did pioneering work in nanotechnology, superfluidity, and quantum computing. What made Feynman so relatable, however, was his ability to popularize his work, and his many books and autobiographies captured the public imagination and earned him a legacy in the public eye as the face of intellectual rigor, scientific progress, and the powers of the rational mind.

But there is not some special access to reality that is afforded to theoretical physicists alone—what made Feynman’s mindset and worldview so compelling was how he thought, not what he thought. In other words, he was consistently led to ask himself about what he knew, how he knew it, and how he could do better and learn more.

This is precisely what this book is about. Using the inimitable Feynman as our guide and inspiration, we will peer beyond the realm of physics and engage with the underlying nature of inquiry itself, and how we might become students of life, in the very broadest sense. Whatever your vocation, skill set, expertise, special interest, or personal challenges, your life can be improved by learning to learn.

No matter if you are primarily concerned with personal relationships, your occupation, your life path in general, or the grand, overarching philosophical questions that have teased and taunted even the greatest minds, you cannot help but improve your situation by fine-tuning those intellectual faculties that have the sole job of orienting you in the universe and helping you make sense of it. Consider this fine-tuning process a kind of meta-skill that is transferable to any area of life.

Learn how to observe, to synthesize information, to analyze, to create, to solve problems, to extract meaning, to ask questions and seek their answers—in other words, learning to think—and you will master yourself and your world to whatever extent is possible for a human being. The ability to really think (and we will soon see how most of us have a complete misunderstanding of what thinking is) will never go out of fashion or lose its value.

Your brain is a tool that will inspire the elevated use of every other tool you encounter. It’s the kind of tool that possesses a fascinating potential—the ability to change and adapt itself as needed. Like the physicists who have learned to operate at the very vanguard of human comprehension, you, too, will be able to ask What do I have to be, and how ought I to think, to understand this?

Think Like a Martian

In an interview, Feynman once shared a game that his father had taught him as a child. They’d sit at the dinner table engrossed in discussion of a topic, and his father would playfully ask something like, Suppose we were Martians who had come to the Earth for the first time and were looking at things from the outside, having never seen them before. What would that be like? What would we see?

On the one hand, this is a simple child’s fancy, but on the other, it captures the spirit of scientific inquiry. It’s a game that asks us what radically curious perception would look like, with zero preconceptions. What would the world look like to you if you had no pre-existing beliefs about it, no biases, no prior understanding to cloud your observations?

It’s a question that gets deeper and deeper the more you think about it.

With fresh eyes, everything would start to look wildly interesting. You would take nothing for granted. For example, being a Martian, let’s suppose you never slept and had no need for it. You didn’t know what sleep was and had never even imagined it before. It was not only not a part of your world, it wasn’t even something you acknowledged as being strange or impossible.

Now imagine you came to Earth and observed that within every twenty-four-hour cycle, human beings of every kind would fall into a period of unconsciousness, and they would close their eyes and grow still and lie horizontal, their breathing slowing. You’d notice they’d get into big pouches made out of foam and layers of fabric, roughly the same size as their bodies, and stay there for a handful of hours.

Now, if you were a scientist Martian, you would have a load of questions! Where would you even start? You’d wonder what was happening and why. You’d be curious about what it felt like to suddenly lose consciousness this way, and what purpose it was serving, and what it meant that humans seemed to vary in their practice of this habit. You’d wonder what their experience was like—what does it actually mean to not be awake? Does your brain still work? Does your consciousness go off all at once or does it happen gradually? Why?

For a Martian who only knows one state of being—wakefulness—thinking about the idea of sleep must be like human beings imagining some other, third state of consciousness in addition to sleep and wakefulness.

You have started with something completely arbitrary, obvious, and kind of boring (sleep), and in no time you are grappling with very deep questions of what it means to be conscious, how we can actually know what another person’s consciousness feels like, and what we are really talking about when we use an everyday word like awake or aware.

Now, such questions can be fun if they inspire a renewed appreciation for the strangeness of life . . . and can certainly be good starting points for writing science fiction! But let’s go deeper.

Feynman gave an analogy where he described the process of seeing a bird in a tree. Someone might ask you what bird it is, and you could give its name. Now, does that mean you know what the bird is? Do you really grasp the meaning of what is in front of you, and can you say you have knowledge of it? Consider that the name you give will be in your language. You say the bird is a lark, but an Italian speaker says it’s an allodola and a Greek speaker says it’s a korydallos and Hindi speaker says it’s a लवा! Maybe a Martian comes down and, when asked what he sees, blows air bubbles out a little funnel on his head . . .

You get the picture. Knowing the arbitrary symbols assigned to a thing is not knowing it. Recognizing certain patterns and features and mapping them onto pre-existing mental models is, in a way, the opposite of really knowing it. Have you ever really seen a bird? Look again. What do you really see? Imagine you have never been told anything about birds and have stumbled, brand new, with a fresh and unused brain, into the world. There is a phenomenon unfolding in front of you—a kind of movement of light, a noise, a being. What is it?

So, if you were the Martian observing Earth people sleeping, go a step deeper and imagine that you have no idea what consciousness is, and no pre-existing beliefs about this thing called the mind. After all, if someone were to ask you right now, what is the mind, do you think you could easily explain it to them if they didn’t already know?

The Martian question is a powerful tool for getting beyond the limits of our language. Sometimes, we think of learning as an accumulative process—that we are ignorant, and then we pile knowledge on top of that ignorance, adding to our understanding. But in many ways, really grasping the nature of reality is just as much about taking away—by peeling back the layers of assumption, we clear our perception and look at things afresh.

The biggest impediment to understanding the world as it is, then, is the insistence that