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These Daily Rituals Made Einstein a Genius
“I think 99 times and find nothing.”
I’ve been learning about the personality behind the genius from the book, Einstein by Walter Isaacson. There’s so much to him than theories. I’m getting to know who he was when he wasn’t working. His habits, rituals, routines and character. He used this as a daily ritual to unlock his highest level of thinking. Einstein spent a lot of time away from his desk. He did this on purpose. And then rewrote the laws of the universe. It’s not a coincidence.
He engineered regular time from his own thoughts. He scheduled time away from his brain. What most people don’t know is that Einstein thought in pictures. Thought experiments, visual images and intuitions that had to be translated into mathematics after the fact. “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution,” he said.
He imagined riding a beam of light. He pictured a man falling in an elevator with no gravity. He saw things before he could prove them.
The question is why.
He valued what the ancient greeks called scholē. It means “leisure” or “free time.” His “unhurried attention to the present” changed his relationship with his brain. He was a…
