The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [80]
The cafeteria fringe are well-suited to seeing around corners; they are not so mired in the mainstream that they cannot step back and view multiple angles. Blue demonstrated such freethinking when he opined that Facebook could take over Google. (Incidentally, I ran Blue’s argument by The Google Story coauthor Mark Malseed, who said, “Overall his point is valid and shows a deeper understanding of how these services and businesses truly work.”)
Living life on a tangent to the prevailing norms places the cafeteria fringe uniquely at the threshold of new movements and new directions. As National Book Award winner Don DeLillo observed in the Hungry Mind Review, “The Writer . . . is situated now, if anywhere, on the margins of culture. But isn’t this where he belongs? How could it be any other way? And in my personal view this is a perfect place to observe what’s happening at the dead center of things. . . . The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he’ll become.”
Experts say that this kind of vision is why Albert Einstein was able to understand physics’ biggest puzzles. Considered a rebel and a loner as a child, Einstein, said a colleague, “was inclined to separate himself from children his own age and to engage in daydreaming and meditative musing.” He often preferred to tackle mathematical proofs than to socialize. “Play and playmates were forgotten. For days on end he sat alone, immersed in the search for a solution, not giving up until he found it,” his sister told biographer Walter Isaacson.
As a child, Einstein was slow to speak. “When I ask myself how it happened that I in particular discovered the relativity theory,” he said, “it seemed to lie in the following circumstance. The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time. But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was already grown up. Consequently I probed more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child would have.”
At school, Einstein wrote, being bullied gave him “a lively sense of being an outsider.” Although he earned good grades, he was so uncomfortable with the “mechanical,” militaristic teaching style, which was devoid of creativity, that his obvious aversion to it led teachers to push him out of school before graduation.
Being an outsider helped Einstein immensely; because he wasn’t accepted into the physics establishment, he had nothing to lose by challenging the status quo. “He comes in entirely as an outsider. He lets his mind wander. He’s not endangering his academic position because he doesn’t have one, and he can take those risks,” Einstein scholar Gerald Holton told the Boston Globe. While other scientists metaphorically climbed the north face of Mount Everest, Holton said, Einstein thought “it’s the wrong mountain and it’s the wrong face, and you ought to really be hovering above it all.”
Einstein developed the theory of relativity precisely because of his different way of thinking. “Other scientists had come close to his insight, but they were too confined by the dogmas of the day. Einstein alone was impertinent enough to discard the notion of absolute time, one of the sacred tenets of classical physics since Newton,” Isaacson wrote in a Wired article. “What made Einstein special was his impertinence, his nonconformity, and his distaste for dogma. Einstein’s genius reminds us that a society’s competitive advantage comes not from teaching the multiplication or periodic tables but from nurturing rebels. Grinds have their place, but unruly geeks change the world.”
RESILIENCE
Activist Marian Wright Edelman is the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, the nation’s foremost child advocacy organization; she was also the first African-American admitted to the Mississippi Bar. When asked for her secret to success, she identified two characteristics