Five Life Lessons from Albert Einstein

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WAYNE RIVERS: Hi everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at Performance Construction Advisors, where We Build Better Contractors.

This week I want to talk about five life lessons from Albert Einstein. Should be pretty interesting. So this came from historyfacts.com, and the article said Einstein is the face of genius. It's like that old cliche, you look up the word genius in the dictionary, there's a picture of Albert Einstein. I think we can all agree with that, and the article said he thought deeply about what it means to live a purposeful, ethical life. When we think of successful people, Einstein, you name it, throughout history, Thomas Edison, all the great historical figures, we think of them as being really successful.

So what is success? What is success, and what does that really mean? The best definition of success I ever heard was, gosh, 30 something years ago from a man named Earl Nightingale. He used to have radio shows and eventually did... Well, he made record recordings, motivational recordings on those giant records in the '50s and '60s. Eventually that got condensed down to cassette tapes, which is what I listened to, and Earl Nightingale said, "Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal," and progressive because success doesn't happen like that. Elon Musk doesn't become the world's first trillionaire like that. It was all of the work that he put in day by day, week by week, hour by hour over a period of years, and any successful person, Einstein, et cetera, is that way. We are the product of our behaviors and our actions day to day to day, and that accumulates into success over time.

Now, what about this is important to you? Well, one of the things we emphasize here at PCA is balance. So you take meaning from your work, your construction work is wonderfully meaningful, but there's also the balance aspect of it, because you could easily find yourself working 85 to 100 hours a week, and you can sustain that for a while, but that doesn't equate to a balanced life over time.

So what does Einstein say are the five life lessons in his manner of thinking? Number one, imagination is the key. He said that, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." I'm not always the most imaginative person, but I can see that philosophy, and so much of his breakthrough thinking was based in imagination and what he called thought experiments. I think he either coined the term or the term was coined about Einstein. He engaged in thought experiments. According to physicists of the time, he wasn't that great at math, but he had imagination that others did not have. He says that knowledge is limited, whereas imagination circles the entire earth, and he said, "It's not an escape. Using imagination is not an escape, but allows you to break through in thinking that may be holding you back in some aspect."

Okay. Number two, stay curious, be open to new perspectives and change. Education should be indefinite, and what he meant is lifelong learning, and so many of our great members are lifelong learners, and they're learning new ways and better ways to do things even now at, shall we say, for some of us in advanced age.

He said, number three, be valuable, not successful. That's the way you create a construction career and a construction life, I think, is you add value, and it's not that you're trying to be successful, it's that you're trying to add value and be a valued part of the team, and that's the way to get ahead. He said, "A man of value will give more than he receives. Value stems from love and devotion to others and objectives." I think that's kind of impactful.

Number four, follow your intuition. He said, "I believe in intuition and inspirations." He believed in gut feel and leaps of faith. What was the great line I heard about leaps of faith? It was from a speaker named... Oh my gosh, Les Brown. Les Brown, a speaker. I must have heard this 30 years ago. He said, "Leap and the net shall appear," and I'm not sure that's good advice when you're building out a construction project, but you do need leaps of faith in order to bound forward in life.

Finally, number five, have the courage to question authority. One of the things that I think I learned from my wife, and maybe she's reinforced in me, is irreverence, and so we go out and we meet highly successful people, some of whom are mega-millionaires with planes and boats and mansions and people who are really at the top of their profession, but even in doing speeches in front of 1,500 people, I've never been in awe of any of them.

When it comes down to it, we're all the same, and part of that is questioning authority and that little spark of irreverence that causes me to look at someone who's made, say, $100 million and think, "Wow, if he or she did it, I can do that too," and ultimately we're all the same. We're all in it together and having a bit of irreverence and questioning authority can stand you in good stead. Don't overdo it, but it can stand you in good stead. He said, "Blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth," and absolutely hit the nail on the head, and he said, "Progress starts when someone asks the question, why?"

Five life lessons from Albert Einstein. What would you add to his list? What's your genius? What's your unique genius, and what would you suggest that we should add? Email me, [email protected].

This is Wayne Rivers at PCA, where We Build Better Contractors.

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