33 · Feynman Was Playing

Feynman won the Putnam at MIT with no formal preparation. This has been done by someone who just had fun playing with it. You also have perspicacity, focus and discipline — while having fun. But the work that must be done will be genuinely unfathomable, and you'll technically be taking arguably doctorate-level courses online at U of Manitoba full-time while studying.

At the 2009 IOI, the then 14-year-old Gennady Korotkevich said of his success: "I try various strategies, and one of them is the right one. I am no genius. I am simply good at it." He spent no more than three to four hours a day at the computer; his hobbies were football and table tennis. What if the answer was not eighteen hours of grind? What if you just find something you're interested in getting good at, persist for some time, and it works because you really like it?

There is one book called Play, and it talks about how being playful opens up mastery — not grinding and toiling. When you love your craft, you just want to work all the time. That cracks the biggest propaganda in the world: that suffering, stress and pain get you to greatness. Some degree is necessary, I guess, but the truth and the main focus should be play and having fun with it.

Why is it, ironically, that those who come out on top are often the ones simply loving the game — not doing it for an outcome, but with that strong internal drive, usually in intellectual pursuits? Why do some random computer science professors ace and dominate quant interviews? It's worth asking. Some fields are won by the people who live and die for the field itself.

What if I really purified my intentions — didn't think about the accolades and the prizes at all, and used them only as direction for the vector of effort? The accolades are not the true barometer of success, and for some reason the people who end up best at these competitions tend to show the purest intentions. They did what they loved, struggled, and loved staying inside the hard parts. Pure intentions seem to be the most important thing.

I think the answer is pure childlike curiosity, and the bravery to maintain those intentions. The person I become during the pursuit, and the fulfilling work itself, is the reward; the accolades are just an aim for the intellectual vectors.

Maintain the beauty of doing things for the sake of it, not just for survival and utility. Even people in the medieval ages, who had war nearly every day, found the beauty of life.

Remember this feeling. I vividly remember thinking "what the fuck is this" when I first heard Jordan Peterson talk — and it's almost identical to when I first came into contact with the how-to-be-a-quant content. Dive in. You don't need decades; the doctorate will be much easier — personal research, reading, analysis — if you do all of this in advance.

If I play, I play to win. Finish what you started and end it with a W. A firm, fat W. And yet — hold the paradox. The best state is just working, having so much fun that emotion and mindset disappear into the work. The problem is optimising for the wrong thing: mindset. The predominant constituent of your conversations must be blunt knowledge and discussion of the maths itself. If you're thinking about your mindset while you're working, you're not working.