Make It Matter

Introduction

When the nobel prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman was still getting his graduate degree at Princeton, he was asked to oversee a group of engineers who were tasked, without much context, to perform an endless series of tedious calculations. The math wasn’t especially difficult if you were an engineer, but the work proceeded very slowly and it was full of errors. Growing more frustrated with the performance, Feynman made a critical discovery that would dramatically alter the course of events moving forward. He realized the problem wasn’t the math, but that the engineers were totally disengaged. So he sagely convinced his superiors to let the engineers in on what he already knew—why they were performing the calculations, and why ...