It’s been almost a year since I started going through the Feynman Lectures. After this year, I can tell what worked well and what work not so well.

I really enjoy the style. I like that Feynman doesn’t treat me as an idiot. He doesn’t try to follow a certain path and openly discusses ideas that are usually left for more advanced courses. I like that this book aims at intuition and true understanding, and not just mechanically remembering and applying formulas. I like how he sometimes gives you a perspective that connects things in a way that you’re left speechless.

I like the book itself. It’s classic and elegant. I don’t know why everything should be playful, colorful, and flashy. The Feynman lectures feel timeless.

I went through fourteen lectures so far, which is not a lot, and it makes me sad. I was also going through Spivak’s Calculus at the same time and covered half the book. The reason why I covered so few lectures is that, for some reason, I stopped reading and doing exercises at the end of March, and I never picked up the momentum until very recently. So I wasted almost half a year.

Consistency is more important than inspiration because consistency builds momentum. It’s challenging to get back on track once you stopped.

Doing exercises helps a lot. Often, I found myself thinking, “Oh, that’s easy, I understand that,” only to later discover that I have no idea how to approach a problem. Theoretical and practical knowledge are different things. It’s also easy to confuse understanding with familiarity.

Space repetition works. Even though I wasn’t reading the lectures for half a year, I still kept doing Mochi cards from time to time. It’s probably the only thing that helped me to keep my knowledge from the previous months.