QI The Book of the Dead
of a geek:
The fact that I beat a drum has nothing to do with the fact that I do theoretical physics. Theoretical physics is a human endeavor, one of the higher developments of human beings – and this perpetual desire to prove that people who do it are human by showing that they do other things that a few other humans do (like playing bongo drums) is insulting to me .
He didn’t play the bongos because he was a physicist; he played the bongos because he was Richard Feynman, a man with a lifelong aversion to boredom. As he once wrote: ‘You cannot develop a personality with physics alone, the rest of life must be worked in.’ In his final years, dying of cancer, he became fascinated by the central Asian republic of Tuva, researching its history and culture – particularly the throat-singing, which he loved – and planning a visit. The story of his cat-and-mouse, decade-long game with Russian bureaucracy became his last book, Tuva or Bust! It’s as funny, quirky and life-affirming as you’d expect. His visa finally arrived the day after he died.
Richard Feynman’s absorption in his subject, and his defiant determination to have fun right to the end, sums up the attitude that animates each of these six lives. Each learned to be happy in their own skin and to do so by being positive. Of those who went to school at all, none of them was a particularly attentive pupil:they taught themselves by observing the world and people around them. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked that although he wasn’t sure why we were here, he was ‘pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves’. Epicurus would have had words with him about that. Enjoyment for each of the six came from doing what they loved to do. And that spirit is infectious. Who wouldn’t want to sit down to ‘a capital lunch’ with Mary Seacole, go for a country walk with Edward Jenner, eavesdrop on Ben Franklin at a party, or spend an evening in a bar where Moll Cutpurse was singing, accompanied by Richard Feynman on bongos? This is the real meaning of genius: to expand our sense of what’s human, to cheer us up. Nietzsche – not himself, perhaps, at the top of anyone’s cheerful list, but a great admirer of Epicurus – certainly thought so: ‘There is one thing one has to have: either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge.’
CHAPTER THREE
Driven
If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astonish ourselves .
THOMAS EDISON
W hat drives you? What gets you up in the morning? Is it the same thing that compels a person to sail round the world in a coracle or spend forty years trying to grow a black tulip? The word ‘motivation’ is (rather surprisingly) little more than a hundred years old, but the thing itself (whatever it may be) is as ancient as our species. Consciously or unconsciously, and for reasons no one really understands, the ‘reward centres’ of our brains are chemically stimulated by activities like making money or exacting revenge, as well as by more abstract pleasures such as witnessing beauty or solving puzzles. As habit-forming as eating, drinking or exercise, they can drive people to the most astonishing places. Here are six people who never even paused to look up from the road.
If there is a more driven person in human history than Genghis Khan (about 1162–1227) we should pray we don’t bump into him on a dark night.
The Mongol Empire stretched all the way from the Pacific coast of China to Hungary and covered almost a quarter of the land mass of the planet. It was the largest empire the world has ever seen: four times bigger than Alexander’s and twice the size of Rome’s, and Genghis Khan created it from nothing in just twenty years. Under his leadership, the Mongols were the most successful military force of all time. From a population base of well under a million people they were responsible for the deaths of over 50 million human beings, roughly a third of the inhabitants of the lands they conquered.
What bound the Mongols together wasn’t a lust for blood, but a new-found sense of nationhood. Until the time of Genghis Khan there was no ‘Mongolia’. Asia north of the Gobi desert was home to half a dozen loose confederations of nomadic tribes of which the Mongols were only one. Competing for sparse grazing land for their herds of sheep and horses, they were often unfriendly
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