Winning a Nobel Prize is no big deal, but winning it with an IQ of 124 is really something.
Interpretation
Winning a Nobel Prize is significant, but achieving it with an average IQ highlights the importance of creativity and unconventional thinking.
This quote by Richard P. Feynman emphasizes that intelligence, as measured by IQ, is not the sole determinant of success. Rather, it suggests that creativity, determination, and the ability to think outside conventional norms are crucial for achieving remarkable feats, such as winning a Nobel Prize, even if one's IQ is considered average.
In practice
In a speech about innovative thinking in science and research.
The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?
We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem.
For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.
There's this little box that African-American actors have to work in, in the first place, and I was able to rise above that box. I could have done a bunch of movies where I stayed as the Axel Foley or Reggie Hammond persona. But I didn't want to be doing the same thing all the time. Every now and then, you crash and burn, but that's part of it.
A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them. This sequence is something that all achievers have in common. They do not see a mistake is as their failure; rather it is simply a learning experience. Achievers view a mistake as an opportunity to do something over again and do it right the second time. A mistake is simply the price they pay to achieve success.
I've been lucky. Opportunities don't often come along. So, when they do, you have to grab them.
Winning 'Motor Trend' Car of the year is probably the closest thing to winning the Oscar or Emmy of the car industry.
Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.
Success never resides in the world of weak wishes, but in the palace of purposeful plans and prayerful persistence.
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