Maybe Feynman was Feynman because he was willing to work at it longer and harder than other people around him.
I remember reading once that he was about to have an operation to remove his tumor within a week and it wasn't certain that he would survive. The doctor in fact told him point blank that there was a chance that he could die. A friend came up to him with a physics problem and he spent the entire day and evening working at it. They failed and decided to call it intractable.
So, Feynman goes home and later in the night he calls him up to say that he has a solution. That was a man a week away from near certain death. Is that something innate or someone with the sheer persistence and experience to bend things his way? I want to ask how many people who will be reading this would have done the same? I wouldn't have, and perhaps this is why Feynman was Feynman.
I think there was also part of him that just can't help but solving problems. He's spent so much time solving problems and became even better at it, but he was probably still extremely fascinated by his science and just couldn't help but solving this problem.
I have noticed a similar thing, where if a cs problem is interesting enough, I just have to think about it, even when other interesting things are going on in the real world. I think it might be an (unhealthy?) fascination with a certain field.
Having read Feynman's books and descriptions of him in other places it seems to me he was supremely gifted but also willing to indulge his curiosity about seeming trivial things that is uncommon in professional scientists - the whole thing with spinning plates being a good example.
There are so many supremely gifted people out there, but almost none of them reach the Feynman-ian stage of problem solving. I just remembered an extremely interesting thing I can't remember one example of his "gifts" in childhood. He messed with radios and had a personal lab, but even I did stuff analogous to that and I am certainly not "supremely gifted" or gifted at all. So did you and almost every HN reader.
His "gifts" become apparent in mid adolescence, and the interesting thing is that these are more a combination of hard work and his environment than gifts. Let's stop talking about Richard Feynman for a moment, did you know he had a sister Joan Feynman who became an extremely senior scientist at NASA? {see: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2002-04/my-mother-scie...I'll put it up separately too it is worth it. [edit: It's up over here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520685]}
She was brilliant too and had the same characteristics as her brother. Now one would assume that his gifts would be unique, a genetic lottery. It is quite often that siblings of famous scientists achieve next to nothing in life compared to their brothers/sisters. However, here we have someone who fought her way up life pretty much the same way Feynman did.
Perhaps it wasn't a genetic lottery, but an environment constructed by an amazing father who taught his kids that in order to do anything in life you need to work hard at it until you fail, and then you try again.
You know it is so difficult to accept this, but Feynman the phenomena was nothing more than dollops of hard work and persistence with an open mind. No wonder he used to scoff at IQ tests. I have a higher IQ than Feynman's reported IQ and this being HN it is highly probable that the person reading this does so too, but am I "smarter" than him? No way.
However, there is one thing he had in him that most people don't have; creativity, but this too can be cultivated slowly over time...
Somehow, I doubt that Murray Gell-Mann, or any Nobel Prize-winning physicist could have been a slouch. Working one's ass off is a given at that level. And yet, even to Gell-Mann, Feynman was impossibly capable of solving difficult problems. Just putting in the hours and effort might be enough to make a great physicist, but it won't guarantee abilities on par with Feynman.
Didn't Gell-Mann say that the thing Feynman was truly the best at was inventing anecdotes about himself? You never know that much about other physicists because they generally don't publish multiple volumes of their own memoirs...
I remember reading once that he was about to have an operation to remove his tumor within a week and it wasn't certain that he would survive. The doctor in fact told him point blank that there was a chance that he could die. A friend came up to him with a physics problem and he spent the entire day and evening working at it. They failed and decided to call it intractable.
So, Feynman goes home and later in the night he calls him up to say that he has a solution. That was a man a week away from near certain death. Is that something innate or someone with the sheer persistence and experience to bend things his way? I want to ask how many people who will be reading this would have done the same? I wouldn't have, and perhaps this is why Feynman was Feynman.
P.S. - The article was awesome.