Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

I finally fixed it because I had, and still have, persistence. Once I get on a puzzle, I can’t get off.

The reason why I say i'm "uncultured" or "anti-intellectual" probably goes all the way back to the time when I was in high school. I was always worried about being a sissy; I didn't want to be too delicate. To me, no real man ever paid any attention to poetry and such things. How poetry ever got written -- that never struck me! So I developed a negative attitude toward the guy who studies French literature, or studies too much music or poetry --- all those "fancy" things. I admired better the steel-worker, the shop and welder, or the machine shop man. I always thought the guy who worked in the machine shop and could make things, now he was a real guy! That was my attitude. To be a practical man was, to me, always somehow a positive virtue, and to be "uncultured" or "intellectual" was not. The first was right, of course, but he second was crazy.

And then I thought to myself, "You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it's impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!" It was a brilliant idea: 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. It wasn't a failure on my part that the Institute for Advanced Study expected me to he that good; it was impossible. It was clearly a mistake-and the moment I appreciated the possibility that they might be wrong, I realized that it was also true of all the other places, including my own university. I am what I am, and if they expected me to he good and they're offering me some money for it, it's their hard luck.

i was so excited that i couldnt think.it's like when you are rushing for an airplane,and you dont know whether youre late or not,and you just cant make it,when somebody says,"its daylight saving time!" yes, but which way? You cant think in the excitement."