You Are Not Einstein. Neither Was He.

As a kid when I used to think about Einstein I had no more information at my disposal than knowing “the guy who wrote E = mc^2” and “genius”. But only when I read the first book on relativity that I realised he was kind of someone like me! “I knew it! I knew there’s something has to be wrong with buses, because when I move forward bus next to me moves back, as if it’s actually moving!” I used to exclaim to my own. I think that’s pretty much common experience with every kid on the planet who got his first dose of relativity (I basically used to think bus bends space and if I put my hand out it will so much that I should see light bending but I was 13, spare me)

There is something quietly profound in that childhood irritation that most people overlook. The bus slightly offended common sense. And that offense is actually a cognitive event worth examining. It means the mind had already built a model of how motion should behave, and reality violated it. That gap between the model and the world, that precise outrage, is where original thinking lives. Most people tend to patch the gap and move on. A very few people stare at it until the gap tells them something.

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How many of you are actually Einsteins? If you are reading this, I’m sorry to tell you, most probably you aren’t any “genius”. Because you haven’t done anything important to escape the mediocrity of life hence you are still in my contacts! (I promise I won’t offend you further).

If I have to measure someone’s cognitive capacity I would measure their intelligence not by what they can solve but by how they think. One of the highest signs of intelligence is the ability to think about your own thinking, what psychologists formally call metacognition. It’s a well-studied capacity, and research consistently shows it predicts academic and creative achievement better than raw IQ scores alone. Okay let’s consider you have it, all the brains in the world (actually 1 in 40 thousand are actually as intelligent as Einstein so there are plenty). But do you have the “guidance” that it needs? Do you live in the pre-internet world like Einstein used to live where distractions were much harder? Einstein himself once said the secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources and one thing he was very good at hiding from, structurally, was noise. He had stretches of genuine solitude at the patent office in Bern, hours of uninterrupted thinking that his biographers, including Walter Isaacson, credit as quietly essential to his 1905 papers. Do you have education, society and freedom (as a kid and young adult) to chase whatever you want to achieve? Most probably not.

Some of you are in a good position I would say. Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to an alien when I talk to some of you, as you cross my cognitive threshold so easily on hard maths. Some of you had deep curiosity from the day you were born. Some of you have so intense focus that you don’t even check your messages for weeks! Some of you have been taught in ivy schools and have access to top professors and resources at your fingertips, and yet you are still not Einsteins!

Here’s something worth sitting with: psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, after decades of studying genuinely creative people, scientists, artists, writers, found that what separated them wasn’t IQ or privilege alone. It was something he called intrinsic motivation combined with a prepared environment (nature and nurture in simpler terms). Talent, in his framing, is almost table stakes. The rarer ingredient is the constellation of conditions around it. Which means the question isn’t just “are you smart enough?” but “are you situated correctly?” And for most of us, the honest answer is: not quite.

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When I woke up out of my illusion, I saw myself that I still don’t fully understand relativity. That gave me some form of sadness as I could feel I’m no longer the young chicken who can just think about buses all day, or even if I do, I’m expected to put maths behind it and theorise it, a skill which I definitely do not possess. So should I just consider myself dumb and not think about the external world at all? Because clearly I’m not trained enough, young enough and most importantly intelligent enough to understand the world like Einstein did in his mid twenties!

That sadness is itself a kind of thinking worth examining. It is what happens when the mind confuses the map for the territory, when it starts to believe that understanding must arrive in formalised, credentialed, mathematically dressed form or it doesn’t count. But curiosity precedes formalism, Always! The question existed before the equation. The unease existed before the paper. Somewhere in the pressure to be rigorous, the permission to simply wonder quietly gets revoked and that revocation is perhaps the single most common way intelligence defeats itself.

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In the most practical way, the answer is obviously yes. Not all of us need to be Einsteins, and 99.999% will never be! Because life is extremely complex and has some other factors which will never make us feel particularly clever.

But if you look closer at it, slightly in spiritual sense (I use that term in psychological sense) you realise that Einstein isn’t about how many papers he published or what did he achieve through them. Obviously he changed our understanding of the universe and did so in fairly young age, no denying in that, but wasn’t it his insensible curiosity that led him to achieve it? When Einstein was writing his papers he wasn’t thinking about “Einstein” who should achieve XYZ by XYZ in life. Titles and accolades came later when he actually published those (which is the human side of things, and hence Einstein was indeed a human!). There is actually a lovely parallel in the research on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, studies going back to Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory in the 1980s show that people doing creative and analytical work for internal reasons, curiosity, the itch to understand, consistently outperform those doing it for reward or recognition. Einstein, at least in his formative years, was almost pathologically the former.

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Here’s my personal example to make this more clear: I was reading this neuroscience book just few days ago. And it explains how visual perception works in the human brain. How there are thirty or so parts in human perception that process different things, which isn’t an exaggeration by the way, the visual cortex alone is subdivided into over thirty(!) specialised regions, each handling something distinct: motion, colour, edges, faces. Something that fascinated me, at least for a while.

What is worth pausing on is not the neuroscience itself but what it structurally implies about curiosity. The brain does not passively receive the world, each of those thirty-odd regions processes its fragment independently, and only then does the visual cortex stitch them into a single coherent experience. Neurologists call this binding, and the remarkable thing is that the brain performs it so seamlessly that the construction is completely invisible to the person experiencing it. I think curiosity works the same way. It is not a single faculty that either exists in you or doesn’t. It is a binding process: sensation, pattern recognition, discomfort at inconsistency, the refusal to accept the stitched picture as the whole story. What separates the genuinely curious mind is not that it feels more, but that it notices the seams.

This curiosity in me isn’t any different from that of Einstein, cognitively we both have same brains (and you too!) Sure, I can’t solve quantum gravity with it, but does that make me any less than Einstein? We all have something that makes us curious. But life prevents us from being intelligent. Being Einstein isn’t about googling something one sunny morning about the stuff you are interested in. Sure, that’s absolutely the first step! But Einstein wasn’t just curious but an intelligent fellow. Being Einstein is about being curious about your own curiosity, thinking about your own thinking! What makes me tickle? Why does something work and what makes it work? It’s about allowing yourself to be that kid who thinks about light bending on his hand and trying to see the refraction of light (turns out I was right but just needed better eyes).

Light bending is not a small instinct to have had. It implies, without any formal knowledge, that light has a relationship with space, that it is not simply indifferent to the physical world it travels through. That is not a wrong thought. That is not even an incomplete thought. It is a thought pointed precisely at something real, something that took the rest of science centuries to formalise. The instruments to confirm it came much later. The thought itself was already there, in a thirteen year old, on a bus, slightly offended by the world. Sadly, Einstein beat me in the race of coming on earth.

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio makes an interesting point in this territory, that emotion and curiosity are not the enemy of rational thought but its engine. The “aha” feeling, the itch, the mild obsession with a question you can’t shake: these aren’t distractions from intelligence, they are how intelligence gets mobilised. Einstein’s thought experiments were basically structured daydreams. The bus, the light beam, riding alongside a photon, these are not the outputs of rigorous training. They are the outputs of someone who gave himself permission to keep asking why past the age when most people stop.

Instead of seeing the greats with eyes as “what did he achieve?” maybe we should focus on the process: “how did he achieve it?” We can’t all have super high IQs but we definitely can be curious about our own curiosity. It’s much much harder than it sounds. But just like Einstein cracked space-time and gravity we can at least try to crack this equation of curiosity. Be so precise that we will get the euphoria of being a human and maybe internalise “Einstein”.

Thanks for reading!