A lesson from Feynman

Don't think it is so different, being a scientist. The average person is not so far away from a scientist. He may be far away from an artist or poet or something, but I doubt that too. I think in the normal common sense of everyday life that there is a lot of the kind of thinking that scientists do.....

Really all we (scientists) do is a hell of a lot more of one kind of thing that is normal and ordinary! People do have imagination, they just don't work on it as long. Creativity is done by everybody, it's just that scientists do more of it.  What isn't ordinary is to do it so intensively that all this experience is piled up for all these years on the same limited subject. 

A scientist's work is normal activities of humans carried to a fault, in a very exaggerated form. Ordinary people do do it as often, or, as I do, think about the same problem everyday. Only idiots like me do that! Or Darwin, or somebody who worries about the same question. "Where do the animals come from?" Or, "What is the relation of species?" A scientist works on it, and thinks about it for years! What is do, is something that common people often do,but so much more that it looks crazy! But it's trying to find the potentiality as a human being.

For example, neither you nor I have muscles that stand way out on our arms like these fabulous guys. For us that would be impossible. Well they work and they work and they work on it. In that case, it might be a fault. How big can you make those muscles? How can you make the chest look great? They try to find out how far you can go.And therefore, they do something with an intensity that is out of the ordinary. It doesn't mean that we never lift weights. All they do is lift weights more. But, like us, they're trying to find the greatest potentiality of human beings' activity in a certain direction.

-Richard Feynman
Feyman's rainbow, A search for beauty in Physics and in Life. By Leonard Mlodinow

The book chronicles some exchanges between Mlodinow, then a new postdoctoral fellow at Caltech unsure of himself and Feynman, the resident genius, during the last few years of Feynman's life in the early 1980s as he was battling cancer.