Next, although we will see that most breakthrough innovators share some personal traits that make them more likely to generate and execute breakthrough ideas, being at the right place at the right time still matters. Chapters 6 and 7 look at the situational advantages—opportunities (and challenges) of an era and access to resources—that aided the rise of these innovators. Finally, as noted above, although this book will show that breakthrough innovators often have some unique and some difficult-to-imitate characteristics or experiences, we can still learn a great deal from them about enhancing innovation. Chapter 8 will summarize the implications for how we can nurture and shape the breakthrough innovation potential in ourselves, in the people we work with, and in our children.
Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth.
—Albert Einstein1
1
“I gang my own gait.…”
A Sense of “Separateness”
Many of the most prolific breakthrough innovators exhibit a marked sense of “separateness,” perceiving themselves as different or disconnected from the crowd. This separateness can reveal itself in a lack of interest in social interaction, a rejection of rules and norms, and often isolation even from family members. It is not always easy to tell whether an innovator made a voluntary choice to be separate, was born with innate personality traits that led to separateness, or acquired a sense of separateness involuntarily because of circumstances beyond the innovator’s control. However, that sense of separateness is usually sharply discernible by both the innovator and those around her, and it typically emerges quite early in life. Albert Einstein provides an excellent example—he not only exhibited a sense of separateness; he also wrote about it and reflected extensively on how it influenced his ability to be an original thinker.
Albert Einstein was known for great warmth and love for mankind, but in his direct interpersonal relationships he was often cold or detached. Einstein loved humanity and was an avid champion of human rights, pacifism, and nondiscrimination. He could be funny and make and appreciate close friendships. Yet he never lost his sense of disconnect from others and was notoriously aloof and rebellious. He articulated it poignantly in a book titled The World as I See It:
My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced freedom from the need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I gang my own gait and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties I have never lost an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude—a feeling which increases with the years. One is sharply conscious, yet without regret, of the limits to the possibility of mutual understanding and sympathy with one’s fellow-creatures. Such a person no doubt loses something in the way of geniality and light-heartedness; on the other hand, he is largely independent of the opinions, habits, and judgments of his fellow and avoids the temptation to take his stand on such insecure foundations.2
Born in Germany on March 14, 1879, Einstein was slow to learn to talk, not uttering his first words until after the age of two, and for most of his life exhibited a form of echolalia—the repetition of phrases, often under the breath. Echolalia is extremely common in autistic children (roughly 75 percent of children on the autism spectrum are estimated to exhibit echolalia), but it can also appear in the absence of any disorder and is sometimes exhibited by children learning to speak. Einstein himself attributed his echolalia to his delay in speaking and noted that he liked to quietly repeat sentences over and over in hopes of perfecting them before voicing them out loud.
Although Einstein’s childhood home and garden were often bustling with children, he tended to keep to himself, pursuing quieter activities. As his longtime colleague Phillipp Frank noted, “From the very beginning he was inclined to separate himself from children his own age and to engage in daydreaming and meditative musing.”3 Some psychologists have speculated that Einstein might have had a mild form of autism that caused him to have far greater ability to analyze the dynamics of the universe than to sense and care about the humans around him. Similar speculations about autism have also at times been made about Bill Gates, in part because he constantly rocks his body while working. He lowers his upper body to a forty-five-degree angle and raises it again, repetitively, with the intensity of the rocking varying with his mood. Many autistic people exhibit repetitive or automatic movements such as rocking, but Gates believes that “it is just excess energy.… I should stop, but I haven’t yet. They claim I started at an extremely young age.”4 Gates is also described as an introvert, not having strong social skills, and sometimes exhibiting a disregard for personal hygiene. However, none of these characteristics suggest that he is actually autistic. Gates is extremely intelligent, highly functional, and, according to his former girlfriend Ann Winblad, a very open and emotional person. He is quite capable of expressing his feelings and understanding those of others. It is just that, as Winblad mentions, Gates is often in a “pure mind state” where hygiene and social graces are a low priority. This aspect of Gates’s nature is exhibited by many serial breakthrough innovators, serial entrepreneurs, and other exceptionally driven people: the prioritization of intellectual pursuits or extreme goals can cause some people to disregard personal appearance or social graces, as we shall see with not only Einstein but also Steve Jobs, Marie Curie, and Dean Kamen.
When Einstein began attending school, at age six, he was withdrawn and quiet, and he did not make many friends. He did not like sports, and his classmates often teased him. He spoke slowly, and his teachers perceived him as inattentive. On one occasion a teacher remarked to him that he would never amount to anything because of his inability to exhibit the necessary discipline for the type of education provided in the school.5 On another occasion, when Einstein’s father inquired with a teacher about what profession the boy should pursue, the teacher responded that it did not really matter as he was unlikely to excel in anything. Einstein would later criticize his childhood school by noting, “The worst thing seems to be for a school principally to work with methods of fear, force and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys healthy feelings, the integrity of and self-confidence of pupils.”6 Yet despite the mutual enmity with which Einstein and his teachers appeared to feel for each other, Einstein often earned the highest grades in the class. Although the regimented rules and rote memorization of school inspired only resentment by the young Einstein, at home he reveled in practicing algebra and showed a strong interest in science. Max Talmud, a medical student who had meals with the Einstein family once a week, noted the boy’s intense interest and began bringing him science and math books. As Talmud would later note, “In all those years, I never saw him reading any light literature. Nor did I see him in the company of schoolmates or other boys of his own age.” Also, “He showed a particular inclination toward physics and took pleasure in conversing on physical phenomena. I gave him therefor for reading matter A. Bernstein’s Popular Books on Physical Science and L. Buchner’s Force and Matter, two works that were then quite popular in Germany.” Talmud noted that Einstein read the books with “breathless suspense.”7 By the time he was twelve, Einstein was teaching himself higher mathematics from books—well ahead of his school curriculum—and, as Talmud noted, “Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was so high that I could no longer follow.”8
Up to the age of twelve, Einstein had (in his own words) a “deep religiosity,” despite having nonreligious parents.9 However, at the age of twelve he became convinced that the stories in the Bible could not be true and that the state was deliberately deceiving young people through religion. This planted the seeds of distrust for authority that would come to define his personality. As he recounted, “Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude towards the convictions which were alive in any specific social environment—an attitude which has never again le
ft me even though later on, because of better insight into the causal connections, it lost some of its original poignancy.”10 Einstein would later return to believing in a greater spiritual being, but he would never lose his distaste for authority. This had direct consequences on his success in school; although Einstein was a natural and gifted student, his disrespect created friction with his teachers. Little evidence exists that Einstein was overtly rebellious in class, but his disdain for his professors was readily apparent. As his Greek professor said to him, “You sit there in the back row smiling. And that undermines the respect a teacher needs from his class.”11 When Einstein was sixteen, the family business collapsed, so the family moved to Milan, intending for Einstein to stay behind to finish his studies in Munich. Instead, the sixteen-year-old decided to drop out of high school, determined to study on his own and seek admission into a technical college in Zurich. He left Germany and soon renounced his German citizenship (likely in order to avoid joining the army, which would have been required when he turned seventeen). To continue his pursuit of self-education, he bought all three volumes of Jules Violle’s advanced physics text and set to work studying them intensely.
In the fall of 1895 he received permission to take the entrance exam at Zurich Polytechnic two years ahead of time. Although he easily passed the math and science sections, he failed to pass the general section (which included literature, zoology, botany, French, and politics), and he ended up going to a cantonal school in Aarau based on the teaching philosophy of Swiss education reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. This proved to be a wonderful move for Einstein. Pestalozzi’s philosophy was that students should be able to reach their own conclusions. They should have the opportunity to observe, experiment, and exercise their own intuition. Instead of an authoritarian environment that emphasized rote memorization, as Einstein had experienced in his German gymnasium, the school in Aarau nurtured each student’s individuality and emphasized each student’s free will and responsibility. Perhaps because he was now more comfortable in the Aarau culture, Einstein began to be more social, making friends and cultivating a sense of wit and charm. His classmate Hans Byland described him as “sure of himself.… Nothing escaped his sharp eyes.… Unhampered by convention, his attitude toward the world was that of the laughing philosopher.”12
Pestalozzi also emphasized the value of a visual understanding of concepts (rather than numbers and language)—a fundamental principle that would influence Einstein his entire life. It was at Aarau that Einstein began using “thought experiments,” whereby he would explore physics concepts by picturing them visually in his mind, such as lightning strikes and moving trains, blind beetles crawling on curved branches, and devices designed to identify the location and velocity of speeding electrons.13 One of his most famous visual thought experiments pertained to light: to understand how light moves, he imagined what it would be like to travel alongside a light beam.14 What would it look like? If light were indeed a wave, then the light beam itself would be stationary. It was a puzzle that motivated a large part of his future work.
Einstein was accepted into Zurich Polytechnic the following year at the age of seventeen. He was frequently quoted much later in life that the years in Zurich were some of the happiest of his life. It was here he met Michele Besso and Marcel Grossmann, who would become lifelong friends and would sometimes help him work out the mathematics of his theories. At Zurich his intelligence was frequently acknowledged, but he was also known as irreverent. He had a distracted and disorganized air about him, and he paid scant attention to his clothes or grooming. He was also very prone to skipping class, preferring instead to study subjects on his own. This was perceived as arrogance and disrespect, which earned him uneven grades and animosity from some of the faculty. His physics professor, Heinrich Weber, was quoted as saying, “You’re a clever fellow, but you have one fault: You won’t let anyone tell you a thing!”15 In 1900 Einstein graduated from Zurich Polytechnic near the bottom of his class.
The next couple of years were difficult. Einstein did not want to join his father’s company as an engineer, and his former professors at Zurich Polytechnic were not interested in offering him a job as an assistant professor or in writing him the glowing recommendations he would need to get one elsewhere. He was twenty-one years old, was in love with Mileva Marić (a classmate from Zurich Polytechnic whom his parents found to be unsuitable as a wife because, in part, she suffered from chronic ill health and a limp), and was subsisting on sporadic jobs as a math tutor. In despair, he wrote to nearly every physics professor in Europe, pleading for a job so that he could continue his studies. Most did not respond, and those that did rejected him. During this period Marić and Einstein also produced a daughter, whom he appears to have never publicly acknowledged (in fact, scholars of Einstein were surprised to make the discovery of her existence in 1986, when a stash of letters were found in a California safe-deposit box). Without a job he could not marry Marić, and without a marriage he could not be seen with their child.
Finally, with the help of his friend Marcel Grossman, he got a job as an examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in 1902. Although this job was considered well beneath his qualifications, the move turned out surprisingly well. Einstein found he was able to complete his work in a few hours each day, leaving him time to do his own study and thought experiments. Gainful employment also meant that he could finally marry Marić, which he did on January 6, 1903, although their child had apparently already been given up for adoption. Einstein later expressed gratitude that he ended up as a patent examiner rather than an assistant professor, for academia might have induced him to publish “safe” papers that embraced accepted theories. In the academic world, papers must go through a process of peer review prior to publication; a paper is accepted for publication only if reviewers deem it worthy. If a paper challenges popular ideas or does not show reverence for those who have previously published in the area (who may also be reviewing the paper), it is far less likely to be accepted for publication. Furthermore, after being published, an article gains legitimacy and becomes well-known only if others cite it, build upon it, and teach with it. If an article is ignored, the ideas in the paper may quietly die on the vine without ever having reached a wide audience. Needless to say, it was thus risky for Einstein to write papers that boldly challenged consecrated ideas by well-respected physicists. However, because Einstein did not yet really “belong” to academia, he had less to lose by flouting its norms. It was not in his nature to be deferential to others in order to curry favor. Furthermore, in his role as a patent examiner he was encouraged to be a skeptical and independent thinker.
The year 1905 turned out to be pivotal. In a four-month period from March to June, he wrote papers at a frenzied pace and developed multiple significant breakthroughs in physics, alluded to in a letter he wrote to his friend Conrad Habicht in May 1905:
Why have you still not sent me your dissertation? Don’t you know that I am one of the 1½ fellows who would read it with interest and pleasure, you wretched man? I promise you four papers in return. The first deals with radiation and the energy properties of light and is very revolutionary, as you will see if you send me your work first. The second paper is a determination of the true sizes of atoms.… The third proves that bodies on the order of magnitude 1/1000 mm, suspended in liquids, must already perform an observable random motion that is produced by thermal motion. Such movement of suspended bodies has actually been observed by physiologists who call it Brownian molecular motion. The fourth paper is only a rough draft at this point, and is an electrodynamics of moving bodies which employs a modification of the theory of space and time.16
The first paper that Einstein describes made a theoretical case for light being in the form of discrete particles of energy then called “quanta” (later known as photons) and arguing that the wave effect of light was actually the observation of averages of where those particles were at any point in time. He performed some basic empirical tests that yielded results
consistent with his hypothesis. The implications of quantum mechanics would eventually overthrow much of classical physics, but in 1905 it was only a hesitantly considered idea. His second paper on the size of molecules underwent a few rounds of corrections before being submitted as a doctoral dissertation to Dr. Kleiner at the Zurich Polytechnic. This paper earned Einstein his doctorate in April 1905. In May his third paper created quite a stir by providing a theoretical reasoning for the empirical observation of Brownian motion, while at the same time providing a compelling argument that Avogadro’s number could be determined from observations with an ordinary microscope. His paper was widely considered by the physics community to be astonishing and impressive.
Around this time Einstein started to experience a “state of psychic tension” about the conflict between Newton’s laws and Maxwell’s equations: “At the very beginning, when the special theory of relativity began to germinate in me, I was visited by all sorts of nervous conflicts.… When young, I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion.”17 Although Einstein was interested in the work of both Newton and Maxwell, he knew that their ideas were incompatible. As he would later note, “[T]he constancy of the velocity of light is not consistent with the law of the addition of velocities.”18 This problem gnawed at him, and he spent almost a year trying to resolve it. He had almost given up on it when his “aha!” moment came. He suddenly realized that there was no such thing as absolute time and thus no such thing as absolute simultaneity; there was no ether (the substance that nineteenth-century physicists believed filled all of space and enabled propagation of electromagnetic and gravitational forces), no absolute rest: time is relative based on an observer’s motion, and so is space. He made his arguments by means of thought experiments involving moving trains and clocks (it is probably not inconsequential that he lived next to the Bern train station and was at the time receiving a flood of patent applications at the patent office directed at finding a way to synchronize clocks with an electrical signal).
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