Walter Isaacson

And so I hope with my books, I'm saying...

This isn't a how-to guide, but this is somebody you can walk alongside.

You can see...

Einstein growing up Jewish in Germany.

You can see Jennifer Doudna growing up as an outsider, or Leonardo da Vinci, or Elon Musk in really violent South Africa with a psychologically difficult father, and getting off the train when he goes to anti-apartheid concert with his brother, and there's a man with a knife sticking out of his head, and they step into the pool of blood, and it's sticky on their souls.

This causes, you know, scars that last the rest of your life.

And the question is not, how do you avoid getting scarred?

It's, you know, how do you deal with it?

Well, I'll talk about the misfit for a second because, you know, we talked about Leonardo being that way.

You know, Einstein is Jewish in Germany at a time when it starts getting difficult.

He's slow in learning how to talk, and he's a visual thinker, so he's always daydreaming and imagining things.

The first time he applies to the Zurich Polytech, because he runs away from the German education system because there's too much learning by rote.

He gets rejected by the Zurich Polytech.

Now, it's the second best school in Zurich, and they're rejecting Einstein.

I tried to find, but couldn't, the name of the admissions counselor at the Zurich Polytech.

Like, you rejected Einstein?

And then he doesn't finish in the top half of his class, and once he

does, and he goes to graduate school.

They don't accept his dissertation, so he can't get a job.

He's not teaching it.