Image: The Nobel Foundation

It is an idea we often have in the workplace, the idea of working together. Cooperation! How beautiful a thing. Yet so often we fail to achieve that which we set out to do, quibbling and arguing without giving proper time to hear our fellow man’s words.

Here is an excerpt from Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, describing the teamwork put forth by a room full of great minds. Notice their clarity and how even he is surprised by their conclusion given a common circumstance.

“One of the first interesting experiences I had in this project at Princeton was meeting great men. I had never met very many great men before. But there was an evaluation committee that had to try to help us along, and help us ultimately decide which way we were going to separate the uranium. This committee had men like Compton and Tolman and Smyth and Urey and Rabi and Oppenheimer on it. I would sit in because I understood the theory of how our process of separating isotopes worked, and so they’d ask me questions and talk about it. In these discussions one man would make a point. Then Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say, well, maybe, but there’s this other possibility we have to consider against it.

So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and disturbed that Compton doesn’t repeat and emphasize his point. Finally at the end, Tolman, who’s the chairman, would say, “Well, having heard all these arguments, I guess it’s true that Compton’s argument is the best of all, and now we have to go ahead.”

It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best — summing it all up — without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.”- Richard Feynman

As you can see, humbleness pays its dividends in the intellectual community. Understand this and be sure to check your ego and pride at the door. In this room, all that matters is what you bring to the table.

P.S. Be sure to check out these book by Feynman, I’ll get around to doing a review over them at some point, but until then read up!