by Ashutosh Jogalekar
Considered the epitome of genius, Albert Einstein appears like a wellspring of intellect gushing forth fully formed from the ground, without precedents or process. There was little in his lineage to suggest genius; his parents Hermann and Pauline, while having a pronounced aptitude for mathematics and music, gave no inkling of the off-scale progeny they would bring forth. His career itself is now the stuff of legend. In 1905, while working on physics almost as a side-project while sustaining a day job as technical patent clerk, third class, at the patent office in Bern, he published five papers that revolutionized physics and can only be compared to Isaac Newton’s burst of high creativity as he sought refuge from the plague. Among these were papers heralding his famous equation, E=mc^2, along with ones describing special relativity, Brownian motion and the basis of the photoelectric effect that cemented the particle nature of light. In one of history’s ironic episodes, it was the photoelectric effect paper rather than the one on special relativity that Einstein himself called revolutionary and that won him the 1922 Nobel Prize in physics.
But in judging Einstein’s superlative achievements, both in terms of his birth and his evolution as a physicist, it is easy to think him of him as an entirely self-made genius. Nothing could be further from the truth. Einstein stood on the proverbial shoulders of giants – Newton, Mach, Faraday, Maxwell, Lorentz, among others – men who had laid the foundations of physics for two centuries before him and who he always had effusive praise for. But quite apart from learning from his intellectual ancestry, Einstein also honed useful habits and personal qualities that enabled him to triumph in his work. Too often when we read about brilliant men and women, there’s a tendency to enshrine and emphasize pure intellect and discard the personal qualities, as if the two were cleanly separable. But the fact of the matter is that raw brilliance and qualities are like genes and culture, each feeding off of each other and nurturing each other’s growth and success.
As psychologist Angela Duckworth described in her book “Grit”, genius without effort and determination can fail, or fail to live up to its great promise at the very least. And so it was for Einstein. Which makes it a matter of curiosity at the minimum ,and more promisingly a tool for measurably enhancing the efficiency of our own more modest work, to survey the personal qualities that Einstein embodied that made him successful. So what were these? Read more »