This week’s book learning is from a combination of books on Richard Feynman and Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs.
This week’s learning is of a slightly different nature. It’s more of an observation than a learning and I hope to hear your thoughts on the same.
Every once in a while, we have men who change the world. Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman and Steve Jobs are examples of such men I’ve read about in the past year.
A common observation is their obsession with simplifying life and focusing their bandwidth on what they considered most important. And an easy place to observe this was clothing. Steve Jobs, of course, made his black turtleneck and blue jeans combination famous while at Apple. This was his work ‘uniform’. And he had about 40 turtlenecks of different sizes lying around his house. He made uniform (like many other things) fashionable!
Einstein is rumoured to have worn the exact same combination of clothes every day till his second wife came to his life and took charge of his wardrobe. And Feynman also shows numerous similarities in terms of simplification of life.
I find that these great men got 2 key concepts. The first is the concept that creativity stems from order and routine. And the second is that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. And I find that such simplification matters greatly if we plan/hope to be self directed.
Look forward to your thoughts on the topic in the comments.
Here’s to some simplification this week!
A Learning a Day 