“Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.” –Albert Einstein

I love quotes. I am truly guilty of that. Maybe its because they capture something bite sized and compressed. Great people leave a life of work, projects and history behind when they pass, and in quotes we can find their insight in just a phrase or two.

Deeper still, I think a quote goes beyond the volumes of work giants leave in their wake. Beneath legend and myth, there existed real people, the stories only they knew, a journey, experience, and struggle to realize untold potential. Quotes reveal forgotten gems. They can inspire how we live. They can change how we face adversity. They can guide our thinking.

Among my favorite individuals to quote, Albert Einstein reins supreme. This is not because of his contribution to science. As an avid researcher of the philosophy of science I realize, like Einstein, that all discoveries fall to the wayside of intellectual progress. All great discoveries and human contributions are left behind as we find new insight, deeper understanding, and more powerful explanation.

"There could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on as a limiting case." –Albert Einstein

See, I would not bet that you know much about the life and thinking of the man that single handedly created one of the two pillars of Modern Physics: Relativity. Even in the case of the other pillar, Quantum Mechanics, Einstein helped lay founding theory. However, I am willing to bet that when you think of Einstein you see crazy hair, a studious Jew, a nerd, a typical theoretical physicist and an intellect that seems beyond your personal experience.

But he was much more than this. Einstein was a deeply complex and flawed man, a rounded character. And he was acutely aware of his fallibility and limits.

First, he wasn’t born for success. After graduating from technical college, Einstein was unable to find work in the field of physics. He struggled to get a job, and his father died not knowing he would be a tremendous success.

Second, he had a love life that lends itself to scrutiny. Einstein married his cousin. He promised his Nobel prize winnings to his first wife as part of their divorce. And it pains me to say that he was known to be a womanizer, cultivating affairs and playing his violin for ladies.

It is his insistence that he was a normal person that gives Einstein’s words so much meaning for me. Einstein guides me with his views on education, imagination, and genius, not because of his contributions to our fundamental understanding of the cosmos. And I think he can teach us all a thing or two about ourselves.

“Education is what you have when you forget everything you learned in school.” –Albert Einstein

Einstein’s take on education was as unorthodox as his contribution to physics. He was frequently late to class, skipped often,and he could not receive a recommendation after graduation from college. We know that he studied math and physics but that he spent a significant proportion of his days taking leisurely walks and day dreaming. Einstein worked 6 years as a patent lawyer before publishing the four papers that would lead to his world wide fame.

“Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” –Albert Einstein

It would appear that Einstein didn’t see education as a step-by-step scholastic process, but rather as something developed and nurtured over time. When we think of Einstein as a smart man we may not have the right idea. According to Einstein, the smartest person isn’t the one that knows the most, it’s the person who can think differently.

I imagine that Einstein was very proud of how he thought. Again, this is not because he thought he had a superior intellect, rather he pushed himself to think about what others had not considered and see what others had overlooked. He was more interested in fostering imagination in his education than the memorization of facts. In fact, he once said that you should never memorize something you can look up, but we will get back to that.

"When I examined myself, and my methods of thought, I came to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge." –Albert Einstein

One of the things I appreciate most about Albert Einstein’s personal philosophy is his emphasis on imagination. Imagination, that thing we take for granted when it occupies our days as children, is the thing that his world apparently revolved around.

We should not just take this with a grain of salt; we should seriously consider his message. We should think about how our education system shapes our future and the minds that will drive it. Think about the children.

Day after day we ask children to learn more and more facts, but to what end? We are blessed to live in the most incredible era of human history, in which information is at our finger tips. We might even call it the Information Era. Everything you can learn in school is online. Education certainly engages our relationship with this information, but it does not limit our access to it. The spread of iPhone and Android products made sure this is so. Yet, we seem to overlook teaching students how to use this knowledge, how to filter important information from noise, and how to integrate their interests and insights into projects which might benefit society. We have children and adults cram information that they are meant to forget in a matter of months or years. We should have different expectations for ourselves and those around us.

What would Einstein suggest? That is difficult to say for certain without referring to his writing on the topic, but he would certainly want to shift our focus. I believe he would want to foster lateral thinking and creativity in general, and encourage an individual’s access and personal relationship to information. I say this because of the following quote.

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” –Albert Einstein

According to Einstein, genius is common. It is not rare that you (or at the very least parts of yourself) share the qualities of a genius, it is a certainty. We all, regardless of our personal struggle, disability, or anxieties, have something incredible to share with society. We are all capable of great things. To realize this potential we must be open to educating future generations as individuals. We must be open to different kinds of intelligence.

I want to close this article with with a quote from an equally outside-the-box genius of our time, to emphasize just how applicable and powerful this philosophy of learning can be. In an interview, Steve Jobs said “Everything you see around you was made by people just as smart as you”. This is worth repeating, as it is an insight we often lose sight of: Everything in your environment was created by a genetically similar, and therefore cognitively comparable, human being. This understanding is no different in science, technology, public service, government, and the arts. The list goes on. We should keep in mind that Steve Jobs, the man who cemented societies dependence on and affection for technology, was not a particularly sophisticated technician. He was a dreamer and an artist, went on a vision quest to India, and returned with an inspired vision and incredibly high expectation for his work as well as the people around him.

"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality."–Albert Einstein

Revolutionaries aren’t simply talented or special, talent is a gift that occurs in many places. The limiting variables of genius are drive, vision, and investment in one's creative spark-characteristics which all people can cultivate. And though we associate the name Einstein with a math nerd, the truth may be far stranger and closer to home. What made Einstein special was his curiosity and his will to push further, against an orthodoxy that he suspected was wrong.

Education should focus on inspiring children and adults to use their unique qualities for original purposes and progress.

To come full circle, when Einstein says his troubles in math our greater, he doesn’t mean to say he is not a math wiz. He means to say that at all stages of learning, genius, and progress are challenging. His message is that education and genius are relative to the individual. That is an insight we can all learn from and apply.