Embrace the Outsider

Just five years before Einstein’s storied “year of miracles,” the field of physics had been declared void of new discoveries. “‘There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now,’ the revered Lord Kelvin reportedly told the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1900. ‘All that remains is more and more precise measurement.’” So how did Einstein break through?

Albert Einstein was the only person in his graduating class not offered a job at graduation. He exhausted himself for years applying not only to colleges, but even high schools (19 of them, I believe...), but alas, no academic position was offered. His father even wrote to esteemed professors across Europe on his behalf, practically begging someone to take young Albert under his wing.

“Among the many surprising things about the life of Albert Einstein was the trouble he had getting an academic job. Indeed, it would be an astonishing nine years after his graduation from the Zurich Polytechnic in 1900—and four years after the miracle year (1905) in which he not only upended physics but also finally got a doctoral dissertation accepted—before he would be offered a job as a junior professor (ie 1909)... By April 1901, Einstein was reduced to buying a pile of postcards with postage-paid reply attachments in the forlorn hope that he would, at least, get an answer.”

After aimlessly tutoring a few private students, in June 1902, he ended up landing a job in the Swiss Patent Office as a third class patent officer. “Third class” because he had not been awarded a PhD, and you couldn't be a first or second class officer without one. And he got that job only because of the favor of a friend.

In the patent office, he sat on a stool for 8 hours a day, reviewing patent applications, and doing “thought experiments” in his mind, as he did not have access to any of the equipment that folks in academia had to, you know, conduct real experiments. He was certainly inconvenienced by this situation. When he was commissioned to write a piece on relativity he apologized for missing references, saying, “Unfortunately I am not in a position to acquaint myself about everything that has been published on the subject because the library is closed in my free time.”

Despite the legitimate inconvenience he suffered, yet I have wondered whether the “miracle year” was actually a function of his “outsider” status. Was Einstein protected from conventional thinking by being barred from the establishment? Did his many failures provoke him to think more boldly than the narrow conventions that might have been imposed upon him, had he been accepted by the broader academic community?

There's no way to know for sure, in his case, of course. But it's a broadly established phenomenon that breakthroughs are often initiated outside of the establishment (that’s a central premise of David Epstein’s exceptional Range). As Epstein notes, “Karim Lakhani, codirector of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, had (innovation challenge platform) InnoCentive solvers rate problems on how relevant they were to their own field of specialization, and found that ‘the further the problem was from the solver’s expertise, the more likely the were to solve it.’”

What are the practical implications of all this? One insight: perhaps the best time to get creativity out of folks in your organization is at the very beginning, when they first join, while they still have their outside perspective! Perhaps folks' creative utility decreases over the length of exposure to (indoctrination in) the "rules" of the organization or industry.

Bob Sutton takes it one step farther, suggesting that creative organizations should "use job interviews to get new ideas, not to screen candidates." If this is true, perhaps the times an organization can get maximum creativity from folks are 1) in the application process (when they're entirely unconstrained in their thinking and trying to prove they deserve an offer) and 2) in the first 90 days (while they still have fresh perspective, and want to make a good impression / establish a reputation)

(Einstein-related quotes from Walter Isaacson's, Einstein: His Life and Universe)

Related: Beware Conventional Wisdom

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