Hi everyone,

I hope you enjoy this weeks newsletter - I thought I had it scheduled for last Sunday, but I clearly didn't so enjoy!

Constant Experimentation.

Last week I broke down some of the reasons that made Alfred Loomis such a successful force last century.

One of the one's that was most evident was his bias for experimentation.

It was a bias he shared with the great Richard Feynman (the excellent subject of the book, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman.)

Feynman was no doubt a genius - but he was entirely human, struggling and failing at plenty of things in the process. The difference was he had two key features that set him apart from his peers and most of us.

The first, was his method of learning and understanding - which I'll write on another time.

The second, however, was his relentless pursuit to test and experiment everything - either things his own ideas or the information of others. It's perfectly captured in the story where he went as far as to challenge a painter on how yellow paint was mixed when everyone else defaulted to trusting the painter (Spoiler, Feynman turned out to be right.)

Experimentation gave him his edge - it allowed him to go further in his fields than nearly anyone, but more importantly, it allowed him to live a life that he truly enjoyed and loved.

We all need to experiment more.

It's not your Responsibility.

There was one quote that stood out so much in the Feynman book that I underlined it, stared it and wrote it on an index card straight away.

"You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing."

We can be weighed down by the expectations of others. The psychological effect can make you feel trapped or force you down paths that you'll regret.

Free yourself from it now. It's their mistake, not your failing.

Biographies.

One of the things that I enjoy reading the most are biographies (including memoirs and autobiographies).

The fact that you can learn either directly or from the life, of History's greatest people is something that I think goes massively under-appreciated.

You want to build a business? You can read about the modern Titans (Musk, Gates, Bezos, Buffet) or the classic heavy-weights (Rockefeller, Walton, Carnegie).

You want to be a writer? Take lessons from King, L'Amour, Asimov, London, Austen.

There's not a single problem that you're facing that someone else hasn't faced before, in some form - you can either learn how they overcame it or learn from their mistakes.

The more you read, the more connections and patterns you'll be able to recognise. The habits ancient and modern authors shared. The principles that polymaths operated by. The constant fatal flaws that brought some of history's greatest men and women to rock bottom - and in some cases, kept them there.

Biographies offer more than almost any other book - make sure to add a few to your reading list.

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That's all for this week. In the spirit of both Feynman and Loomis, I plan to experiment with the way these are written over the next few weeks - as always, thanks for reading and I hope you got something out of it.