In a famous study, advanced PhDs and undergraduate physics students were given sets of physics problems and asked to sort them into categories. Immediately, a stark difference became apparent. Whereas beginners tended to look at superficial features of the problem—such as whether the problem was about pulleys or inclined planes—experts focused on the deeper principles at work. “Ah, so it’s a conservation of energy problem,” you can almost hear them saying as they categorized the problem by what principles of physics they represented. This approach is more successful in solving problems because it gets to the core of how the problems work.

— Scott Young, Ultralearning

Knowing that I could be painfully wrong and curiosity about why other smart people saw things differently prompted me to look at things through the eyes of others as well as my own. This allowed me to see many more dimensions than if I saw things just through my own eyes.

— Ray Dalio, Principles

So the Big Bang doesn’t actually mark the beginning of our universe; it marks the end of our theoretical understanding.

— Sean Carroll, The Big Picture

…the love of learning seeks something beyond the senses, while the love of spectacle is enticed by the senses themselves…

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

…the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent, and dynamic. It spends its time in transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity and uniformity. That’s what makes the world interesting, that’s what makes it beautiful, and that’s what makes it work.

— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems