S
Thread Author
Shaant
Guest
Imagination, failure, and the courage to ask “what if” shaped his brilliance, and can reshape how we see our own potential
Photo by Andrew George on Unsplash
“Genius” seems to be a word that we use too freely. However, when I was a kid, “Einstein” held the weight of an entire universe.
In the textbooks in school, we saw his image right alongside “intelligence,” as if he had a monopoly on unlocking the human mind. But as I read more about him, the image became murkier and murkier.
What does intelligence even mean? Is it the ability to calculate with raw speed or the ability to consider questions that no one else was smart enough to ask?
I cannot tell you how many nights I lay awake trying to imagine his world. The bending of time and space sounded like witchcraft.
He imagined things that no telescope or machine of his time could possibly confirm, but decades later, the experiments proved him right.
How could someone think so far ahead of the tools of his time?
That unsettled me, because it helped remind me how limited my imagination could be.
His genius wasn’t just about numbers but about imagination.
When I hear people talk about Einstein, they almost always describe him as a human calculator, which seems unfairly reductive.
Sure, he could do math better, faster, and more accurately than everyone else, but his facility for calculations reached far beyond numbers. He thought deeply and abstractly about the universe’s arrangement.
He imagined riding beams of light or clocks that ticked at different rates depending on how quickly he was moving past them. He let those abstract thoughts lead him to his equations.
To me, that kind of abstraction feels more akin to music or poetry than physics.
Many years ago, I encountered a composer who explained that while a melody can emerge spontaneously over time, years of training establish a framework by encircling the notes with the structures of a musical form.
To me, that is like how Einstein thought about the universe; his “music” was the unseen structure of the cosmos, while most of us can only hum a single tune in our heads and write to one melody.
He conducted the orchestra and wrote symphonies.
That is how I see genius, not merely intelligence as we usually define it, but ingenuity honed and sharpened like a knife or chisel through dedication and discipline.
He didn’t just accept the world as it appeared to him. He took his mind’s eye to every “what if” and kept building his symmetry.
And yet, he was profoundly human.
Those who knew him best say he had a difficult time with anything mundane, like cooking or chores, because his head was awash with equations.
This paradox intrigued me: a man capable of calculating stars yet tripping over the earth beneath his feet.
The myth of genius hides the messy truth.
What bothers me most about Einstein’s story is how easily we turn it into legend.
We recognize “the miracle year” when he was 26 and wrote four groundbreaking papers, but we often overlook the poverty and failure that surrounded him.
Those successes were followed by long stretches of what seemed like failure, including his resistance to whole fields of thinking like quantum mechanics.
His attempt at a grand unified field theory worked out no better. He spent decades failing at it.
If anything, his failures are more interesting to me than his successes because they reveal what genius really looks like when mixed with perseverance and stubbornness.
I used to think being brilliant meant having consistent, almost miraculous breakthroughs.
But we all know the truth is slower and far lonelier.
For him, neither failures nor successes were inevitable. There were always other scientists circling the same questions.
I always say if he hadn’t been there, someone else would have eventually arrived.
He also wrote about how thinking deeply is important and, above all, being there at the right moment.
So even if he was first, he also had to wrestle with doubt long before anyone else could see his ideas.
Even in his private life, we see the fault lines beneath the myth.
His relationships didn’t thrive, and his home life suffered greatly.
The scholarly debates are fierce over how much credit for his early work belongs to his first wife, Mileva Marić.
Geniuses, it seems, are not gods but sacrifices of balance and personal well-being.
What his story taught me about my own search for meaning
At some point, I gave up asking if Einstein was “the smartest man ever” and began asking why we are so obsessed with ranking intelligence in the first place.
Intelligence is not just one thing. It is curiosity, creativity, persistence, timing, and sometimes sheer luck.
Einstein had all of this and poured himself mercilessly into physics.
But there are others with equal brilliance who chose different paths: the quiet life of a teacher, an artisan, a poet, or a dreamer who never published a paper.
Genius is not just ability; it is what you decide to do with your life.
When I reflect on my own path, I see that what I admired most about Einstein was not merely his accomplishments but his astounding courage to imagine something no one had ever thought possible.
That courage outweighed clever stories or IQ test results.
He lived in an extraordinary time, when nations crumbled and new ones were born, and humans struggled to catch up with advances in technology.
Yet somehow, despite all of this, he held on to the beauty he discovered in truth and his own curiosity.
As a man from India who later moved across continents, I was left with my own doubts about intelligence and its real value for us.
We value careers, permanence, and recognition, yes, but those are not the core of it all.
What truly sticks is the capacity to see the world differently, to question its assumptions, and to acknowledge the solitary sorrow of being misunderstood until the world is ready to see it your way.
In the end, genius is less about him and more about us.
While Einstein altered physics, he also altered belief in human potentiality.
His theories changed technology, from nuclear power to GPS, but perhaps his most important gift is the living proof that imagination is as important as logic.
He made mistakes, he doubted himself, and he even resisted some of the very revolutions he set in motion.
Yet still, he is remembered as one of the great minds.
What I take away from his story is not that he was perfect or uniquely unmatched.
It is that he lived a life asking questions where everyone else stopped asking, and he went wherever those questions led him.
That is why he will always be larger than life, not because he was error-free, but because he thought so differently that we still feel like we are catching up with him.
Einstein’s Genius Wasn’t Just About Intelligence was originally published in E³ — Entertain Enlighten Empower on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Continue reading...
