"Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist." ~ Pablo Picasso
How did he learn to use his brain to think? He went big! He went really big. He went bigger than he had to at school. He began learning at home too. Instead of giving up, he began giving and thinking more.
He wasn't a good reader in school so he began to read more after school. As he began to read more he began to understand more. He mastered the math being taught in school and then went beyond that and began teaching himself advanced math like geometry and algebra.
Now he found another person who believed in him, his Uncle Jakob, who gave him math problems and advanced math books. And then a college family friend in college saw Albert's promise and started discussing books on philosophy and science with Albert.
Remember how I said that sometimes all it takes is one moment, one person, or one thing to change our lives? Well, now Albert not only had another positive person enter his life but powerful ideas as well.
These powerful ideas came from a book written about 2,000 years earlier called "Elements" by a math teacher from Greece. This man was Euclid, who studied great thinkers born about 1,000 years before him, like Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle.
Like Euclid, Einstein began to think through reasoning of ideas versus memorization of facts. You can practice doing this in school by taking the time to go back and prove if your answers are right, and then revising them if they're wrong.
Einstein, born just like you and I, began to increase his intelligence to above-average levels by thinking like above-average thinkers. As if we needed more proof that this can happen to us too, one of our country's greatest president's, Abraham Lincoln, also began reading and learning from Euclid's "Elements" at age 40. After a dozen business, emotional, and political failures Lincoln turned his life around and became one of the world's greatest leaders since Pericles, the guy who became the best leader of Ancient Greece where Euclid was from.
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Meet Albert Einstein...And Find the Hero in You!
NonfiksiA non-fiction short story about learning to believe in yourself even when it seems no one else does.
