You, too, can learn to think like a genius
Whether young or old, you can adopt an attitude of disbelief and curiosity that leads to a fulfilling life
Something some of the world’s brightest minds — like Albert Einstein or Elon Musk — have in common is challenging the notion of “obvious truths” and realizing they’re not always the hard facts we believe they are.
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ou, too, can think like Albert Einstein. I know that sounds preposterous and, of course, it is a stretch. But stick with me for a moment while we consider anything possible.
Simply traveling with me down the road of all possibilities takes you halfway to Einstein. His secret as a creative genius was that he refused to abide by the assumptions that were made by every other scientist. The same has been said about Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla. Said another way, Einstein and Musk were able to go back to first principles.
They each recognized that some truths are what we know as a matter of observed fact while others are what we think we know as a matter of received wisdom. Many of us don’t, and, in fact can’t distinguish between the two. Doing so is hard because these assumptions — I call them frames — are deeply embedded in our collective consciences. We don’t even recognize them to be social constructions rather than facts.
Einstein, for instance, questioned that space and time are fixed. Everyone else believed that if you have a perfect timepiece and your friend also has a perfect timepiece that you will both live at the same rate forever. This, it makes sense to us, is a given — a truth. You will not suddenly start to age faster than your friend on the basis that your time is sped up. But Einstein realized that this “obvious fact” is not a
truth — it is a belief.
Einstein reconsidered something we take as a given: that speed is defined as a distance traveled over a particular time and speed changes but time does not. Untrue, Einstein pointed out. Time does change with the speed of the car. Indeed, as speed approaches that traveled by light, he theorized, time slows. Since Einstein, science fiction stories abound in which astronauts travel for decades near the speed of light only to come back to find that their children are older than they. He used complex mathematics to “prove” that time slows at exceedingly high speeds.
Theoretical proof is one thing — demonstration is another. About 14 years after that hypothesis, Arthur Eddington produced physical proof. Einstein had gone on to predict that space and time formed a four-dimensional continuum called spacetime. His general theory of relativity imagined that gravitational fields would warp spacetime. In February 1919, Eddington observed the rays of the bright Hyades star cluster crossing the rays from the sun during an eclipse. Theory stated that the gravitational pull of the sun should gravity-shift the stars’ positions in the sky. From the remote island of Príncipe off the west coast of Africa, Eddington found just that — and made front page news all over the world.
Few of us are interested in taking up physics, particularly at an older age. The point is that any of us can live our lives based on two epiphanies put forth in a 2015 blog written by Tim Urban. First: “You don’t know (expletive).” Second: “No one else knows (expletive) either.”
Urban proposes that Musk’s multibillion dollar successes resulted from his unwillingness to believe, for instance, that making space rockets is really expensive. Musk realized that the raw materials cost little and believed that the production could be made greatly more efficient.
Whether you are young or old, you can adopt attitudes of disbelief and curiosity. You can, for instance question everyone else’s notions of success. Is it really about material possessions?
Surveys show that happiness springs more from experiences and relationships. Maybe it’s time to switch from making money to pursuing your nonmaterial passions. Is it really about leaving a legacy for the future? Maybe you can only leave the world a better place if you first focus on satisfaction with who you are and on what is important to you. Is it really true that competitors (economic and otherwise) are threats? Maybe the diverse talents of would-be competitors can become the basis of your best partnerships.
Maybe even uncomfortable divergent attitudes and viewpoints can open your eyes to something enriching.
When I stepped down as the dean and became “just” a regular professor, I said I wanted to become a professional contrarian. So I’ve gone back to personal first principles, which for me involves maximizing adventure. Just in the area of food, for example, I have recently tried crickets, ants, raw oysters and any number of other things I had previously thought disgusting. And I loved all of them! My unwillingness to accept others’ frames and to be curious about everything has been one of the most rewarding adventures of my life.