How Einstein Became Famous: 7 Success Habits

By the time Einstein had visited the United States from Germany, he was so famous across the world that people would treat him as if he were a celebrity. But he wasn't always like that. Now in today's Success Habit Breakdown, I want to highlight a few of Einstein's key habits brought up in his biography that helped him become the physicist we remember today. Now before we go any further, there's a singular experience of Einstein's childhood that started him on this path of curiosity and wonder. And it all started with a compass. When his father gave him a compass, he would just sit up night after night watching the needle point northward. Now the story goes that Einstein was actually sick in bed one day, and his father brought him a compass. And he later recalled being so excited as he examined its mysterious powers that he trembled and he grew cold. And the fact that the needle behaved as if influenced by some hidden force field rather than through the more familiar mechanical method involving touch or contact produced a sense of wonder that motivated him throughout his life. I can still remember, or at least believe I can remember, that this experience made a deep and lasting impression on me, he wrote on one of the many occasions he recounted the incident. Something deeply hidden had to be behind things. Einstein's success habit number one, Einstein, believe it or not, was a rebel and had a massive hatred for authority and the established order. That this young man will one day be synonymous with genius was something none of his professors would have predicted. He would cut class. The professors thought he was a goof-off. As a consequence, Einstein couldn't get a single job after graduation. He even thought about switching fields and selling insurance. Can you imagine opening the door one day and there's Albert Einstein selling you life insurance? Yeah, we're raised in Munich. From a young age, Einstein was a rebellious and independent thinker. He instinctively hated the regimentation of the German school system calling the schools barracks and the teachers lieutenants. At home, he was stimulated more by a free exchange of ideas. Einstein was notorious for resisting and rebelling against any of the established principles. During one particularly rough year where he had lots of interpersonal issues with people, he said, blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. And honestly, skepticism and resistance to received wisdom became literally a hallmark of his life. As he proclaimed in a letter to a fatherly friend in 1901, a foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth. Einstein's success habit number two, using lateral thinking, in other words, creative problem solving. It was like someone who looked for many, many, many dimensions, whether they'll be proven or not, and could see the whole. And that is why I think he loved puzzles so much. But the combination of that vast, vast somewhere in the detachment. A great example of this for Einstein was his obsession with music. And here's a direct quote from his biography. Music was no mere diversion. On the contrary, it helped him think. Whenever he felt that he'd come to the end of a road or faced a difficult challenge in his work, said his son, Hans Albert, he would take refuge in music and that would solve all of his difficulties. The violin thus proved useful during the years he lived alone in Berlin, wrestling with general relativity. He would often play his violin in the kitchen late at night, improvising melodies while he pondered complicated problems, a friend recalled. Then suddenly in the middle of playing, he would announce excitedly, I've got it, as if by inspiration, the answer to the problem would have come to him in the midst of music. Einstein's success habit number three, playing to your strengths and thus following the path of least resistance. Now, even though Einstein here appears to be having fun and laughing with the crowd, especially during his youth, he suffered from a lot of personal self-doubt and a lot of arrogance. But in particular, as far as it goes for following the path of least resistance, in other words, doing that which comes easily to you, he once said at a dinner party, he when asked, why are you specializing in physics? Pernett asked Einstein one day, instead of a field like medicine or law. Because, Einstein replied, I've even less talent for those subjects. Why shouldn't I at least try my luck with physics? Einstein's success habit number four, following the path of simplicity, looking for similarities and looking for unifying principles. For example, Einstein was quoted as being disquieted when there were two seemingly unrelated theories for the same observable phenomenon. And he was also said that his conviction that the universe loves simplification and beauty and his willingness to be guided by this conviction, even if it meant destroying the foundations of Newtonian physics, led him with a clarity of thought that others could not match to his new description of space and time. This comes back to Einstein being that rebel where he was fighting against the established Newtonian physics order, and that's actually what led him to be so successful. The fact that he fought what had been established, that he was such a free thinker in his youth, that became his claim to fame and his claim to some of his genius. Einstein's success habit number five, obsessive focus at whatever the cost. Here's a good example of Einstein's monomaniacal focus on his work. One day, his student Tanner came for a visit and found Einstein in his study pouring over some papers. He was writing with his right hand and holding Edward, his son, in his left. Hans Albert was playing with toy bricks and was trying to get his attention. Wait a minute, I've nearly finished, Einstein said, as he handed Edward to Tanner and kept scribbling his equations. It gave me, said Tanner, a glimpse into his immense powers of concentration. Now, what's interesting is that I interpreted this very differently. I mean, Einstein had both this monomaniacal focus, but it was at the expense of everything else in his life. He had many, many affairs, many, many women on the side. He married his first cousin. And for example, he did very odd things that completely illustrated how physics enveloped his life and was something that he used to get away from the emotional pain of actually living. For example, when going through a separation with his wife, Marik, he wrote her a contract saying things like, I will receive my three meals regularly in my room and you will obey the following points in your relations with me. You will stop talking to me if I requested. Now, another interesting point here, the author says, As a young man, Einstein had predicted in a letter to the mother of his first girlfriend that the joys of science would be a refuge from painful personal emotions. And thus it was. His conquest of general relativity proved easier than finding the formulas for the forces swirling within his family. And one thing he personally said that was very powerful in a speech, one of the strongest motivations that leads men to art and science is to escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and painful dreariness. Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life in order to find peace and security, which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience. Einstein's success habit number six, self-study and constantly investing in himself intellectually. Another interesting aspect is that Einstein actually took up studying geometry and some of the more advanced maths for him at the time for himself just by studying the textbooks over the summer. And another thing here, because many of the polytechnic lectures seemed out of date, Einstein and his friends read the most recent theorists on their own. I played a hooky a lot and studied the masters of theoretical physics with a holy zeal at home, Einstein said. Einstein's success habit number seven, which comes up a lot in his biography, is acknowledging that there's some kind of universal force behind everything. He didn't know what it was, but it truly awed him. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Einstein's brain and his thinking was his belief in some greater power that awed him. For example, he said, when I'm judging a theory, he told his friend Banesh Hoffman, I asked myself whether if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way. When he posed that question, there was one possibility that he simply could not believe. The good Lord would have not have created beautiful and subtle rules that determined most of what happened in the universe, while leaving a few things completely to chance. It felt wrong. If the Lord had wanted to do that, he would have done it thoroughly and not kept to a pattern. He would have gone the whole hog. In that case, we wouldn't have to look for laws at all, he said. A later point in his life, when he was denying the viability of quantum mechanics, he said, Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing, Einstein said, but an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but it does not really bring us any closer to the secrets of the old one. I, at any rate, am convinced that he does not play dice. And maybe most famously, once at a dinner party, when someone mentioned that Einstein was religious, he said, Yes, you can call it that. Try and penetrate with your limited means the secrets of nature, you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent, I am in fact religious. And another final note here, regarding Einstein and belief in God. He was asked, Do you believe in God? And he said, I'm not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the language in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books, but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human beings towards God. We see the universe marvelously arranged, and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Thanks so much for watching this episode of the Tiny Habits Show. Make sure you subscribe below if you want to see more like this. And if you want to see more of these success habit breakdowns of other influential people, whether modern or historical, leave a comment below. This is Alex Hine, out of here. I'll catch you in the next episode.