Isaac Newton was one of the great geniuses in human history. He established the basic laws of physics, discovered the laws of gravity, invented calculus, and refined the scientific method. On this episode we take a look at how he was able to accomplish so much by analyzing his strategies, tactics, and work habits. --- Sponsors: VanMan.Shop - Use code TAKEOVER for 10% off https://www.vesto.com/ - All of your company's financial accounts in one view Speechify.com/Ben - Use code Ben for 15% off Speechify Premium HTTOTW Premium - For all endnotes, takeaways, and bonus episode, subscribe to How to Take Over the World Premium --- Stay in touch: Twitter/X: @BenWilsonTweets Instagram: @HTTOTW Email me: [email protected] Sources: Isaac Newton by James Gleick --- Writing, research, and production by Ben Wilson.
Chapter 1: Who was Isaac Newton?
In 1331 AD, the first instances of the second plague pandemic began somewhere in Central Asia. Within a few years, the disease appeared in the region around the Black Sea, and from there it spread throughout Asia and Europe. It created a level of devastation previously unknown in human history, killing something like 20% of the world's population globally.
And of course, in urban areas, the devastation was even more severe, and in some cities, more than half the inhabitants succumbed to the disease. Over time, the disease became endemic, and for the next 400 years, outbreaks would recur sporadically. The last great outbreak of plague in London, England, occurred in 1666.
In 18 months, it killed around 100,000 people, over a quarter of the city's population. Quickly, London depopulated as people fled for the less crowded countryside. So did other cities and large towns. And about 50 miles away, the University of Cambridge shut its doors and told its students to go home for their own safety.
This must have been particularly troubling for the 23-year-old Isaac Newton, a known hypochondriac. He had just finished his undergraduate studies when the news reached Cambridge that the plague was spreading and he would need to travel the 60 miles to his home in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire.
Now, in 2025, I think we are uniquely positioned to understand at least somewhat what was going through his head, having recently lived through a pandemic ourselves. Of course, COVID was not nearly as deadly as the plague, but many of us recently had this experience of being forced to retreat from our normal daily lives and live out a life of isolation at home.
It was a course of time of fear and confusion, but for many, It might have also been exciting. It was a chance to block out distractions and focus on whatever you wanted to do, just like it was for us. This is certainly how Isaac Newton approached it.
In the idyllic setting of his family estate, Newton had the time and space he needed to tackle the questions that had been pressing on his mind for years now. Mostly, he worked on expanding the field of mathematics. He quickly worked out calculations that could describe curves and shapes, expressions that could find areas that were previously incalculable.
He was inventing the discipline that would later be known as calculus. I like to imagine what he must have felt in those days. Calculus was not a project that he had to work on. There was no professional imperative. No one was looking over his shoulder. He was just doing it for the thrill of learning and discovery.
The fact that he could describe the world around him with mathematical expressions must have felt like peeking behind the curtain of reality. Well, as the legend goes, he was sitting in his yard contemplating all this, contemplating physics and mathematics, perhaps also soaking in the beautiful nature around him to rest and recharge when he noticed an apple fall from his tree.
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Chapter 2: What challenges did Newton face during his early life?
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I've been using them for years, so it's really great stuff. Again, go to vanman.shop and use code TAKEOVER for 10% off. You won't regret it. Okay, so Isaac Newton was born on January 4th, 1643, middle of the 1600s in Lincolnshire, which is toward the eastern coast of England. Newtons were technically nobility, like minor nobility. They weren't very wealthy.
All Isaac Newton inherited from his father was a few sheep, some barley fields, and a few tenants who paid rather meager rent to tend the Newton's fields. He wasn't able to trace his ancestry beyond his grandfather on the paternal side. So not very illustrious ancestry through his father's line. But his mother, that family was gentle folk.
And it seems like actually this is where Isaac got his intelligence. He had a number of notable and successful relatives on his mother's side. And Isaac Newton never knew his father. His father actually died shortly before Newton was born. And his mother is not going to be able to support herself and her newborn son on this land by herself. And so she remarries.
And as part of that marriage agreement, she agrees to leave her small sickly son behind and start a new family with a new husband. And so as a young boy, Isaac Newton was largely raised by his grandmother while his mother went off and started a new family. And I don't really like psychologizing and searching for trauma in people's early life. I think often that kind of stuff is overblown.
But it's not difficult to see how this might affect a person's psyche. Feelings of abandonment, trust issues, difficulty forming close bonds, things like that. And indeed, as you kind of go through Isaac Newton's life, that's exactly what you see. A lot of trust issues, a lot of sensitivity around feeling not wanted or being criticized or anything like that.
And difficulty forming close relationships. And it's not like everything is stable outside of his family either. Newton grows up during the English Civil War. And so there's violence all around as well. There's people marauding, raiding different farms. It's very chaotic. When he's 12, he goes off to a school a few miles away. It's a little too far to walk every day. So he boards at the school.
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Chapter 3: How did the plague impact Newton's work?
isaac newton finds this little niche of mathematics and he finds this professor isaac barrow who kind of understands him and who he can understand he forms a connection with and this really motivates him and encourages his progress at cambridge the biographer james gleek writes he felt learning as a form of obsession a worthy pursuit in god's service but potentially prideful as well okay
So I love that. Learning as a form of obsession. Obsession is crucial to greatness. And I like how Glick puts it there. It was a form of obsession, a worthy pursuit, but potentially prideful as well. That's the thing. Obsession, you can't always control it. Sometimes it controls you. And when you're truly obsessed with something, it's always on the verge of kind of tipping you over the edge.
And that is what Newton thought as well. This form of obsession, he worried about it. He was a religious person. He wanted to serve God and do the right thing. But constantly this obsession with mathematics and science of learning more was kind of pushing him to do more in that domain, in that field. Okay. As I said, he is religious. He's somewhat neurotic about it.
He writes long lists of all his sins, including breaking the Sabbath, unclean thoughts, loving money too much, falling short in piety and devotion, failing to pray enough, things like that. And I don't know, it tells you a little bit about what kind of person he is to just one, two, three, four, list out all of his sins and beat himself up over it. But this is kind of what he does for everything.
He has a notebook that he writes everything in. He jots notes, writes formulas, asks questions, does little sketches and drawings, very similar to Leonardo da Vinci, who, as far as I know, he knew nothing of. Well, he probably knew something of him, right? He was a famous enough figure and he'd lived a couple hundred years before.
But nothing I ever saw indicated that Isaac Newton took major inspiration from Da Vinci. They just independently came to the same process of scribbling everything down in a notebook. James Gleick writes, Okay. So that's a good quote because it shows that's exactly what DaVinci did. DaVinci didn't always do questions. Sometimes he would write them down as learn blank.
Learn how a bird's wings work. Learn why water eddies in a stream. Learn X, Y, Z. But it's the same idea. You're writing what you want to learn. You're writing a question. I think this is a really good way to encourage your curiosity.
Have a notebook like DaVinci or Newton and write down the questions that you would like to answer or the things that you would like to learn and then just everything that you learn on those topics. Okay, so while studying under Isaac Barrow, he begins to make inquiries into what we would now call physics.
He especially wants to get to first principles, to the bottom of things, to understand motion, matter, space, time, you know, basic concepts. He begins to use the word gravity. Now remember, Isaac Newton invented the word gravity in its current contemporary definition of the force of attraction between matter.
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Chapter 4: What breakthroughs did Newton achieve during his Annus Mirabilis?
If you've got a company that operates in multiple countries or has multiple bank accounts, you need Vesto to understand the true financial situation of your companies. Go to Vesto.com, check them out, and let them know that I sent you. He is 23 years old, 22 years old. I didn't do the math, but he's very early 20s, 22 or 23, I think. There is a term, Annus Mirabilis.
It means literally miraculous year, year of miracles, sometimes translated as wonderful year. But it refers to this phenomenon of a year for someone where everything happens at once. It all comes together. The successes come so thick and fast that it seems miraculous. And the most famous Annus Mirabilis would be 1665, 1666 for Isaac Newton. It's a year of unbelievable discovery.
When he first returns home, he builds for himself some bookshelves and a small study, and then he starts thinking, researching, and writing notes. And listen to this passage from the Gleek biography. I find this so interesting. Listen to the way that he works. Quote, Okay, his waste book. He began filling it with reading notes. These mutated seamlessly into original research.
He set himself problems, considered them obsessively, calculated answers, and asked new questions. He pushed past the frontier of knowledge, though he did not know this. The plague year was his transfiguration. Solitary and almost incommunicado, he became the world's paramount mathematician. Okay, a couple takeaways there. The first is idea of a waste book.
OK, Newton was just always writing, writing, writing, always writing, always getting his thoughts down on paper with no filter to the point that he called his notebook, the one where he made some of the most important scientific discoveries in human history, his waste book, his dumping ground. And this applies to almost every domain. You don't want to publish everything.
Obviously, you don't want everyone to see your waste book necessarily, but you should have no filter on your first drafts. You should be putting everything to paper right all the time. And this is something all the greats do, whether in music like John Williams and Beethoven or literature like Steinbeck and Dickens or business or war or whatever.
The great ones are just constantly getting their reps in. And in most domains, that means that they are constantly writing. Okay, so that is my first lesson for how to be like Newton. Are you writing all the time? Do you just dump your thoughts into a notebook or notion or a Google Doc or whatever? But you have that dumping ground for all of your thoughts.
The other thing from that passage that I take away is that he was solitary and as it says, almost incommunicado. He has another great quote in the biography where he says, quote, solitude was the essential part of his genius. Okay. Let me repeat that. I love that. Solitude was the essential part of his genius. I think that is brilliant. And it's true as you read the story.
It's very true of Newton. He did so much great and original research on his own. in that kind of solitary context where you can be truly creative with your own thoughts. And I don't want to exaggerate this because Newton could also be collaborative at times, and he would not have had as much success he did if he wasn't collaborative. So you do need to do both.
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Chapter 5: What role did solitude play in Newton's genius?
So a lot of it is just silence and thinking. And then another one quote, I keep the subject constantly before me and wait until the first dawnings open slowly by little and little into a full and clear light. Okay. I really like that quote. I think often we can't predict inspiration. It's not something that we can force or put on our own timeline, but you have to be there.
You have to, as he says, have the subject constantly before you. And then the light slowly comes on. It reminds me of a quote that I've heard. It's attributed to Picasso. I don't think he actually said it, but the quote is inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. And I think that's often the case.
Many artists and scientists describe inspiration as something that comes from outside of them. Like it comes to them out of thin air from another world. But you have to be there to catch it. It has to find you working. It's not just going to strike you in any moment.
If you kind of have it always in the background of your mind, as Newton says, then you open up the surface area for inspiration to strike. Okay. One other quote from the book that I like from this part of his life, quote, he computed obsessively. All right. So he was always trying to quantify everything to get the measure of it. And I think that's important.
When we think of Newton, we often think of sweeping generalities, right? These big laws for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. But he arrived at these great laws and theorems, not by thinking in generalities, but by looking at specifics and particulars.
It was not theoretically that he arrived at this conclusion, but through experimentation and quantitatively and measuring that he realized, no, this is an actual law. This is the truth. For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. So his style of thinking was not general and sweeping. It was minute and it was detailed. And his greatest discoveries from this period was mainly calculus.
It wasn't for show. It wasn't to give to other people. They were actually private tools. He developed calculus and Newtonian physics to help him track and describe the size and motion and relationship of things, especially celestial bodies, planets, comets, the sun, the earth. And these tools did a remarkable job of describing and predicting reality.
Okay, so from his Annus Mirabilis, as far as the apple goes, he did tell people in later years that an apple was the inspiration for how he understood gravity. The story of it falling from the tree and hitting him on the head, I think that's an invention. We actually don't know anything else about the story of the apple. It could have been an apple on his desk.
But the fact that there was an apple tree in his front yard, essentially, stood very prominently there. That leads many people to suspect that it was an apple that fell from that tree, which seems like a reasonable hypothesis to me. But yes, there was a moment with an apple at Woolsthorpe Manor during this time. Here's all that Newton wrote about his thoughts on gravity during this time.
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Chapter 6: How did Newton develop calculus and the law of gravity?
Fantasy is helped by good air, fasting, moderate wine, spoiled by drunkenness, gluttony, too much study. All right. Let's just chalk up another win for the light eaters out there. It leads to creativity, according to Isaac Newton. I mean, it can't be stopped. Light eating. I tell you guys, this is why you listen to How to Take Over the World. I'll tell you guys, light eating matters.
Fasting, eating very little, moderate wine, and walking, good air, those all increase creativity, fantasy. He added that too much study and extreme passion lead to madness. And that's an interesting comment to me too, because it's a good reminder about the value of moderation, right? Too much study, extreme passion, that leads to madness. He says, you don't want to go that direction.
But at the same time, I think it shows us what kind of person Newton was that he had to guard against too much study and extreme passion. Again, this was not someone who was a brain in a vat. He was not all rationality, no passion. The Far from it. The fact that he had to guard against too much study and extreme passion to me shows that he was in fact a very passionate person.
He loved study and discovery. As the quote goes, if you want to shine like the sun, you have to burn like it. And I think that's true of Newton. He succeeded because he burned like the sun. He was full of fiery passion as well as intelligence and rationality. Okay. So Newton returns to Cambridge after this honest mirabilis, which was actually more like two years long.
It's like two honest mirabilis. He returns to Cambridge. He doesn't tell anyone of his discoveries, including his mentor, Isaac Barrow. But he must show some sort of improvement or new capacity because for the first time, he's elected a fellow of Trinity College in October of 1667. He was 24 years old.
The next year, he does start to open the kimono a little bit to Barrow, who sends along some of his research to a gifted mathematician named Collins, who starts asking all sorts of questions of Newton. And Newton shares some research with him, but he withholds a lot, and the explicit reason being that he does not want to be famous.
He writes, quote, For I see not what there is desirable in public esteem, were I able to acquire and maintain it. I would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I chiefly study to decline. Okay. In other words, if I get famous, people are going to want to meet me. And that is the number one thing I don't want to do. I don't want to meet more people.
And so, yeah, that's one of the reasons he's not sharing his research more widely. A couple of years later, Barrow receives an appointment from the King and moves to London. He leaves his professorship to Newton. So at age 27, Newton becomes Cambridge's second professor of mathematics. As such, he's expected to lecture weekly, but he rarely does. And when he does, no one ever shows up.
The applications for mathematics were not yet widely understood. It was seen as an arcane and somewhat obscure field of study. So instead of lecturing, he spends most of his time researching, tinkering and inventing. He was grinding glass and polishing lenses in order to make better telescopes and microscopes. He was using tin, pitch, and copper to make his own mirrors.
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Chapter 7: What lessons can we learn from Isaac Newton's life?
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. A very noble sentiment. So after engaging with the larger scientific world for just a little bit through the Royal Society, he once again retreats to his studies at Cambridge. And listen to Glick's description of what he was like at Cambridge.
He says, quote, he stayed in his chamber for days at a time, careless of meals, working by candlelight. He was scarcely less isolated when he dined in the hall. The fellows at Trinity College learned to leave him undisturbed at table and to step around diagrams he scratched with his stick in the gravel of the walkways.
They saw him silent and alienated, with shoes down at heel and stockings untied. He feared disease, especially plague and pox, and treated himself preemptively by drinking a self-made elixir of turpentine, rosewater, olive oil, beeswax, and sack. In fact, he was poisoning himself slowly by handling mercury.
Okay, so I mean, to be honest, he's a recluse and a crank, but still a genius who's plugging away at important research. He's also working on theology and alchemy. Alchemy is sort of magical chemistry, mostly designed at creating an elixir of life or being able to transform various metals into gold.
And so often in contemporary times, Isaac Newton is viewed as a brilliant crank because he's working on, yes, scientific pursuits, but also alchemy. I mean, alchemy, that's like astrology, right? But what's important to realize is that the distinction between legitimate science and alchemy had not yet been created. It wasn't yet known that it's impossible to transform base metals into gold.
And yes, even at the time, there was a whiff maybe of crankery. But not totally. All of it seemed like legitimate inquiry, at least to Newton, and I think to most people. Maybe they would have viewed it as a little, exotic, but not nearly as odd as it seems today. The line between science and magic was emerging, but was not yet bright.
And in previous decades and centuries, the line hadn't existed at all, right? Nietzsche makes this point eloquently. He says, quote, do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not beforehand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and wizards who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers? Okay.
And I think that line of continuity is very obvious. In terms of his theology in those studies, he was trying especially to discern the end times, when they would come according to the Bible. Though in the end, he thought he was not able to predict with certainty when the end of the world would occur according to the Bible. but he was, I don't know, trying to figure it out.
And he was not particularly observant in terms of church attendance, but he studied scripture very thoroughly. He had some non-traditional beliefs. He was a non Trinitarian, right? The Trinity is the belief that God, the father and the son and the Holy ghost. So Jesus, God, and the Holy ghost are both three people and one person at the same time. And, um,
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