a person adapts by the dominance of old habits and conditioning that keep them stuck. Harmful memories of shocks and setbacks in their past tell them over and over how limited they are. Einstein was able to ignore old habits of thought that surrounded him. He hung loose and let new solutions come to him through dreaming and intuition. He learned everything he could about a problem, then surrendered to unknown possibilities.
This isn’t how the public views Einstein, who is imagined as a brainiac with wild frowzy hair filling the blackboard with mathematical equations. But let’s look at his career from a personal perspective. As he tells it, Einstein’s great motivation was awe and wonder before the mysteries of Nature. This was a spiritual state, and he would say that penetrating the secrets of the universe was like reading the mind of God. By seeing the cosmos first as a mystery, Einstein was rejecting the habit of seeing it as a giant machine whose moving parts could be figured out and measured. That was how Isaac Newton had viewed physics. Remarkably, Einstein took the most basic notions in the Newtonian system, such as gravity and space, and totally reinvented them.
He did so, as the whole world soon learned, through the theory of relativity and his famous equation, E=mc 2 . Higher mathematics was involved, but that’s a red herring. Einstein once told some young students, “Do not worry about your problems with mathematics. I assure you mine are far greater.” This wasn’t false modesty. His creative method was more like dreaming than cogitating; once he “saw”how time and space worked, devising the mathematical proof came later, with much difficulty.
When you face a new problem, you can solve it in old ways or in a new way. The first is by far the easier path to follow. Think about an old married couple who argue all the time. They feel frustrated and blocked. Neither wants to give an inch. The result is a ritual, in which they repeat the same stubborn opinions, make the same nagging complaints, exhibit the same inability to accept the other’s point of view. What would be a new way to get an old married couple out of their misery?
Instead of remaining stuck in the old behaviors, which are wired into their brains, they could use their brains in the following ways:
HOW TO BE ADAPTABLE
Stop repeating what never worked in the first place.
Stand back and ask for a new solution.
Stop struggling at the level of the problem—the answer never lies there.
Work on your own stuckness. Don’t worry about the other person.
When the old stresses are triggered, walk away.
See righteous anger for what it really is—destructive anger dressed up to sound positive.
Rebuild the bonds that have become frayed.
Take on more of the burden than you think you deserve.
Stop attaching so much weight to being right. In the grand scheme of things, being right is insignificant compared with being happy.
Taking these steps isn’t simply sound psychology: it creates a space so that your brain can change. Repetition glues old habits into the brain. Nursing a negative emotion is the surest way to block positive emotions. So every time an old married couple revisits the same resentments, they are wiring them harder into their brains. Ironically, Einstein, a master at applying such amazing adaptability to physics, saw himself as a failure as a husband and father. He divorced his first wife, Mileva, in 1919 after living apart for five years. A daughter born out of wedlock in 1902 has disappeared from the pages of history. One of his two sons was schizophrenic and died in a mental asylum; the other, who suffered as a child when his parents separated, was alienated from his father for two decades. These situations caused Einstein much pain. But even for a genius, emotions are more primitive and urgent than rational thoughts. Thoughts move like lightning; emotions move much more slowly and sometimes almost imperceptibly.
Here is a good
This isn’t how the public views Einstein, who is imagined as a brainiac with wild frowzy hair filling the blackboard with mathematical equations. But let’s look at his career from a personal perspective. As he tells it, Einstein’s great motivation was awe and wonder before the mysteries of Nature. This was a spiritual state, and he would say that penetrating the secrets of the universe was like reading the mind of God. By seeing the cosmos first as a mystery, Einstein was rejecting the habit of seeing it as a giant machine whose moving parts could be figured out and measured. That was how Isaac Newton had viewed physics. Remarkably, Einstein took the most basic notions in the Newtonian system, such as gravity and space, and totally reinvented them.
He did so, as the whole world soon learned, through the theory of relativity and his famous equation, E=mc 2 . Higher mathematics was involved, but that’s a red herring. Einstein once told some young students, “Do not worry about your problems with mathematics. I assure you mine are far greater.” This wasn’t false modesty. His creative method was more like dreaming than cogitating; once he “saw”how time and space worked, devising the mathematical proof came later, with much difficulty.
When you face a new problem, you can solve it in old ways or in a new way. The first is by far the easier path to follow. Think about an old married couple who argue all the time. They feel frustrated and blocked. Neither wants to give an inch. The result is a ritual, in which they repeat the same stubborn opinions, make the same nagging complaints, exhibit the same inability to accept the other’s point of view. What would be a new way to get an old married couple out of their misery?
Instead of remaining stuck in the old behaviors, which are wired into their brains, they could use their brains in the following ways:
HOW TO BE ADAPTABLE
Stop repeating what never worked in the first place.
Stand back and ask for a new solution.
Stop struggling at the level of the problem—the answer never lies there.
Work on your own stuckness. Don’t worry about the other person.
When the old stresses are triggered, walk away.
See righteous anger for what it really is—destructive anger dressed up to sound positive.
Rebuild the bonds that have become frayed.
Take on more of the burden than you think you deserve.
Stop attaching so much weight to being right. In the grand scheme of things, being right is insignificant compared with being happy.
Taking these steps isn’t simply sound psychology: it creates a space so that your brain can change. Repetition glues old habits into the brain. Nursing a negative emotion is the surest way to block positive emotions. So every time an old married couple revisits the same resentments, they are wiring them harder into their brains. Ironically, Einstein, a master at applying such amazing adaptability to physics, saw himself as a failure as a husband and father. He divorced his first wife, Mileva, in 1919 after living apart for five years. A daughter born out of wedlock in 1902 has disappeared from the pages of history. One of his two sons was schizophrenic and died in a mental asylum; the other, who suffered as a child when his parents separated, was alienated from his father for two decades. These situations caused Einstein much pain. But even for a genius, emotions are more primitive and urgent than rational thoughts. Thoughts move like lightning; emotions move much more slowly and sometimes almost imperceptibly.
Here is a good
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