Science isn't supposed to be a secret club. If you can't explain a concept to a freshman, you don't actually understand it. That’s basically the core philosophy of Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who spent as much time playing bongo drums and cracking safes as he did pondering quantum electrodynamics. He was a weird guy. A brilliant, restless, "don't-take-anything-at-face-value" kind of guy.
When we talk about the Richard Feynman legacy, most people think of the Feynman Diagrams or the Challenger disaster investigation. But his real gift to the world wasn't just math. It was his obsession with honesty in language. He had this intense, almost physical reaction to "jargon." You know the type—those big, heavy words people use to sound smart when they’re actually just hiding the fact that they're confused.
He called it "cargo cult science."
The Feynman Technique: It’s Not Just a Study Hack
You've probably seen those TikToks or LinkedIn posts about the "Feynman Technique." People treat it like a cheat code for exams. Step one: pick a topic. Step two: explain it to a child. Step three: find the gaps. Step four: simplify.
It works. But for Feynman, this wasn't some productivity "hack" he cooked up for a blog. It was his survival mechanism. He was famously curious. As a kid in Far Rockaway, he and his father would go for walks, and his dad would explain the world not by naming things, but by describing how they worked.
If they saw a bird, his dad wouldn't care if it was a "Brown-throated Thrush." He’d say, "Look, that bird is pecking at its feathers. Why? It's trying to get the lice off. The lice eat the flakes of skin."
Knowing the name of the bird tells you exactly nothing about the bird. Richard Feynman carried that realization through his entire life. He realized that names are just labels. Knowledge is about connections.
Why Complexity is Usually a Mask
I've spent years looking at how experts communicate, and honestly, the "Feynman filter" is the best BS detector ever invented. Feynman once recounted a story about being asked to review a set of science textbooks for a school board. He was horrified.
The books were full of things like: "Energy makes it move."
He hated that. It's a circular argument that explains zero. It’s like saying "The car goes because of its go-ness." To Feynman, true brilliance was stripping away the fluff until you were left with the bare, shivering ribs of a concept. If you find yourself using words like "synergy" or "quantum-level optimization" without being able to draw a picture of it on a napkin, you’re probably fooling yourself.
The Manhattan Project and the "Dumbest" Man in the Room
During the 1940s at Los Alamos, Feynman was surrounded by the literal smartest people on the planet. Oppenheimer, Fermi, Bethe. Most of these guys were terrified of looking stupid. Not Feynman.
He was the guy who would walk up to a senior scientist and say, "No, no, you’re crazy, that won’t work." He didn't care about the hierarchy. He cared about the physics. Because he focused on the fundamental building blocks—the "genius words" of simple logic—he could spot flaws in complex systems that others missed because they were too busy admiring the complexity.
There’s a legendary story about him and the "red light" in the processing plant. While other engineers were staring at massive blueprints and freaking out, Feynman just followed the physical pipes. He looked at what was actually happening, not what the manual said was supposed to happen.
That’s the Richard Feynman way. It’s a sort of aggressive common sense.
The Problem With Modern Expertise
We live in a world of hyper-specialization. If you go to a tech conference today, half the speakers are talking in a dialect that requires a glossary. Feynman warned us about this. He worried that science was becoming a ritual of repeating "sacred words" rather than a process of discovery.
Honestly, we see it in AI now. People talk about "neural networks" as if they’re magic black boxes. But if you apply the Feynman mindset, you start asking: "Okay, but what is the math actually doing? Is it just a complex version of 'if this, then that'?" When you stop being intimidated by the vocabulary, the world starts to make sense.
How to Actually Apply This Today
If you want to think like Richard Feynman, you have to be okay with looking like an idiot for five minutes so you don't stay an idiot for a lifetime.
It's about the "First Principles" approach.
Stop using the "Official Name" for things. If you’re trying to understand a business process, don't call it "Vertical Integration." Call it "Owning the truck that delivers the stuff we make." See how much clearer that is? It forces you to think about the truck and the stuff, not the abstract concept.
The "Freshman Test." Write out your idea. Now, remove every word that has more than three syllables. Can you still explain the value? If the value disappears when the big words go away, you don't have a value. You have a slogan.
Admit when you're "Kinda" sure. Feynman was big on uncertainty. He famously said, "I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong."
The Challenger Disaster: A Masterclass in Simplicity
In 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. The government formed a commission. It was full of politicians and high-ranking generals. And then there was Feynman.
While the committee was buried in thousands of pages of contractor reports and bureaucratic finger-pointing, Feynman did something famous. During a televised hearing, he took a piece of the rubber O-ring material, squeezed it with a small C-clamp, and dropped it into a glass of ice water.
He pulled it out and showed that the rubber didn't bounce back. It stayed compressed.
"I believe that has some significance for our problem," he said, with classic understatement.
He didn't need a 400-page PowerPoint. He needed a glass of water and a piece of rubber. That is the ultimate expression of his genius. He turned a complex thermodynamic failure into a visual truth that a ten-year-old could understand.
The Actionable Feynman Roadmap
You don't need a PhD in physics to use this. You just need to be brave enough to be simple.
- Audit your own speech. The next time you’re in a meeting and someone uses a buzzword, ask them to explain it without using that word. Do it nicely. Say, "I’m a bit slow, can you explain that like I’m a high schooler?" You’ll be shocked at how often they can't.
- Write to learn, don't write to impress. When you take notes on a new topic, don't transcribe. Translate. Use your own slang. Use analogies that make sense to you, even if they're silly.
- Destroy the "Golden Calf." Just because a textbook or a famous CEO says something, doesn't make it true. Feynman’s whole life was about testing the "sacred" truths. If the experiment doesn't match the theory, the theory is wrong. Period.
Richard Feynman taught us that the world is incredibly complex, but the way we understand it doesn't have to be. True mastery is the ability to navigate that complexity and come out the other side with a simple story.
Start by stripping away the labels. Look at the "lice on the feathers." Ignore the name of the bird. The names are just noise. The mechanics of the world are where the real magic happens.
If you want to dive deeper, grab a copy of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! It’s not a physics book. It’s a book about how to be a curious human being in a world that tries to make everything boring and complicated. Read it. Then go find something complex and try to explain it to your dog. If the dog looks bored, you’re still using too many big words. Iterate. Simplify. Be honest. That's the Feynman way.
👉 See also: Apple 60W USB-C Charge Cable: What Most People Get Wrong
Next Steps for Implementation:
Identify one complex project or concept you are currently working on. Attempt to describe its core value proposition using only the 1,000 most common words in the English language. This constraint forces you to abandon industry jargon and reveals whether you truly understand the "why" behind your work. Once you have this "plain English" version, use it as the foundation for your next presentation or communication. You will find that clarity creates more buy-in than complexity ever could.