“Anything truly novel is invented only during one’s youth”

This summer I read Walter Isaacson’s illuminating biography of Albert Einstein, the man who is widely considered to be the greatest thinker of the 20th Century. In 1905, when he was only 26 years old, he published four groundbreaking papers that forever changed the way people understood space, time, mass, gravity and energy.

By the time Einstein turned 40 in 1919, at a moment when he was struggling to devise a unified theory of matter, he complained to a friend that “Anything truly novel is invented only during one’s youth. Later, one becomes more experienced, more famous – and more blockheaded“.

Einstein’s frustration at his diminished capabilities as he aged is a phenomenon that is considered common with mathematicians and physicists who seem to make their greatest contributions to science before they turn 40. Einstein remarked to a colleague that as he got older he felt his intellect slowly becoming crippled and calcified.

Why does this happen? In Einstein’s case, it was partly because his early successes had come from his rebellious traits. In his youth, there was a link between his creativity and his willingness to defy authority and the universally accepted cosmological laws of his day. He had no sentimental attachment to the old order and was energized at the chance to show that the accepted knowledge was wrong or incomplete. His stubbornness worked to his advantage.

After he turned 40, his youthful rebellious attitudes were softened by the comforts of fame, renown, riches and a comfortable home. He became wedded to the faith of preserving the certainties and determinism of classical science – leading him to reject the uncertainties inherent in the next great scientific breakthrough, quantum mechanics. His stubbornness began working to his disadvantage as he got older.

It was a fate that Einstein began fearing years before it happened. He wrote after finishing his most groundbreaking papers: “Soon I will reach the age of stagnation and sterility when one laments the revolutionary spirit of the young“. In one of his most revealing statements about himself, Einstein complained: “To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself“. He found it even harder as he got older acknowledging “the increasing difficulty a man past fifty always has adapting to new thoughts”.

Einstein brilliance is beyond compare, but I can relate to his observation about doing your best work when you are young. When I look back at my personal life and work career, I recognize that I was at my most ambitious and innovative during the decades of my 20’s and 30’s.

My adult life exploded with big events in 1982, the year that I turned 22. In the timespan of that one year I managed to graduate from college, marry my college sweetheart, start my first professional job as an engineer, buy a new house and a new car, and learn that my wife and I were going to become first-time parents. I remember filling out a survey designed to measure the amount of stress in your life during that eventful year and being surprised when the calculated stress numbers registered so high that they indicated I should be dead!

But all of it was exhilarating to me at that point in my life. I was experiencing new things and accumulating knowledge like a sponge. I knew that my growing family would be counting on me to be a good provider – which gave me the incentive I needed to focus on building a stable career.

I was determined to be successful in my engineering role and threw myself into learning everything I possibly could about the company I worked for as well as the electronic test and measurement equipment that they manufactured.

Many of my co-workers had graduated from more prestigious universities than me and I felt that I had something to prove. I wanted to make a name for myself and grow my reputation and value within the company by making important contributions to the projects to which I was assigned.

I took several continuing education engineering classes at night to improve my knowledge of subject areas that I knew would be helpful to me at work, I sought out brilliant co-workers who could mentor me and give me wise advice on how to approach complex technical projects, and I questioned everything – wondering if there might be a better solution to the problems we were trying to solve.

This drive in my early career to be successful enabled me to do my most innovative and important work for the company during the decades of my 20’s and 30’s. In the span of my first 18 years working for the company, I was awarded two patents, helped develop multiple new test products which generated millions of dollars for the company, created automated software regression tests significantly lowering product development times while improving software quality, and published frequent technical articles for industry conferences and trade journals.

By the time I turned 40, I could point to many important career milestones and had achieved recognition as a top performer and leader within the company. The rewards of my hard work were a comfortable home and financial independence. With this success I began to have feelings of contentment that lessened my drive to take on new projects or solve interesting problems. I became comfortable and happy with life as it was – I no longer felt the need to over-extend myself.

I was satisfied to rest on my past achievements and to take on less tasking roles that would improve the product in evolutionary, rather than revolutionary ways. Over time, I became the wise, experienced, older mentor to younger employees who came to me for advice and direction.

I felt okay with that transition as I considered it my good fortune to be in a situation where I was able to share my knowledge with a new generation of ambitious young people who were ready to make their own marks on the world by inventing novel new solutions that were now beyond me. In some ways, being a part of those collaborative efforts made me feel better than my individual personal accomplishments.

The famous journalist Ed Bradley once interviewed Bob Dylan in 1998 on the television show 60 minutes, at a time when he was approaching 60 years old. During the course of the interview, Bradley asked Bob what the source of inspiration was for his famous early songs, the ones that led to him being recognized as the voice of a generation while he was still only in his 20’s.

Dylan replied that his early songs were almost magically written and that he felt some kind of power, outside of himself, flowing through him while was writing them. When Bradley asked if he could still tap into that penetrating magic now in his songwriting, Dylan paused and said; “No, I don’t know how I got to write those songs“. Bradley followed up and asked if that disappointed him, Dylan replied softly; “Well you can’t do something forever and I did it once… and I can do other things now – but I can’t do that“.

That is a healthy way, I believe, of thinking about what is possible for each of us as we age. My days of endless ambition and innovative thinking are past. But I can do other things now that I couldn’t do then. I can indulge hobbies that interest me, I can find new paths to hike and rivers to fish, I can help care for my mother in her old age and I can share what I have learned through my life experiences and pass it on to my grandchildren and the larger community via this blog.

There will only ever be one Einstein, none of us will ever be as brilliant as him – but if you are under 40, get busy by putting your spry young mind and youthful ambition to work! Maybe you too can come up with novel ideas and ways of doing things that will help change the world or someone’s life for the better.

And if you are over 40, you can be like Einstein in his older years; contributing in a positive way to his community and sharing his wisdom, experience and good fortune with the next generation. In the end, many of our late in life pursuits that we share with others can end up being more rewarding and meaningful to us than any personal accomplishments we achieve along the way.

R.I.P. RBG

Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away on September 18, 2020. Over the course of her 87 years the noted feminist and surprisingly unlikely popular cultural icon smashed glass ceilings and delivered plenty of wisdom—both inside and outside the courtroom.

On Bader-Ginsburg’s passing, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, issued this statement lauding her service to the nation and her important contributions to the country’s laws:

“Our nation has lost a jurist of historic stature and we at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her — a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”

Chief Justice John Roberts

Her life was filled with notable accomplishments which included graduating with the highest honors from Cornell University in 1954 and from Harvard and Colombia Law Schools at the top of her class.

She slowly worked her way up through the male-dominated law profession beginning with a clerking job in the United States District Court of Appeals in New York, followed by teaching jobs at Rutgers University School of Law and Columbia Law School – where she became the school’s first tenured female professor.

Her teaching and litigation in the 70’s on behalf of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, drew national attention when the legal briefs she wrote led the Supreme Court to strike down laws that favored men over women.

When she was appointed to the United States Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993, she was only the second woman to sit on the bench in the court’s 212 year history. RBG quickly became known for her scholarly, balanced opinions and her forthright personal courage.

But it wasn’t all those legal accomplishments that made RBG so loved – it was her laser-focused attention to be a champion for all those who suffered from injustice and inequality.

She had the Old Testament words “Justice, justice, thou shalt pursue” prominently displayed on the wall of her chamber and it epitomized the mission she pursued throughout her career – to eliminate gender-based stereotyping in legislation and regulations.

Blessed are the peacemakers and RBG should be counted among them because justice and peace have always been inextricably linked. It was Dwight Eisenhower who remarked that “peace and justice are two sides of the same coin“; Martin Luther King who preached that “true peace cannot exist without justice“; and Pope Paul the 6th who advised his flock “If you want peace, work for Justice“.

RBG focused on removing injustice in all its forms and her work helped to codify the important gains won by the women’s and civil rights movements into the nation’s laws; thus bringing a measure of peace to millions of American citizens who had suffered under laws that were not fair.

A child in a Supergirl costume pays respects to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg – Image courtesy of Reuters

One of the best ways to appreciate RBG is to examine her own words of wisdom about the topics that were near and dear to her:

ON HER MOTHER

“My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady, and the other was to be independent. The study of law was unusual for women of my generation. For most girls growing up in the ’40s, the most important degree was not your B.A., but your M.R.S... My mother made reading a delight and counseled me constantly to be able to fend for myself, whatever fortune might have in store for me.“

ON HER HUSBAND

“I had a life partner who thought my work was as important as his, and I think that made all the difference for me.”

ON TURNING REJECTION INTO OPPORTUNITY

“You think about what would have happened… Suppose I had gotten a job as a permanent associate. Probably I would have climbed up the ladder and today I would be a retired partner. So often in life, things that you regard as an impediment turn out to be great good fortune.”

ON FEMALE SUPREME COURT JUSTICES

“When I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the supreme court]? I say ‘When there are nine.’ People are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.“

ON WRITING DISSENTING OPINIONS

“Dissents speak to a future age. It’s not simply to say, ‘my colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way,’ but the greatest dissents do become court opinions... [you have to} fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.“

ON CRITICISM AND NOT GETTING A MAJORITY VOTE

“I’m dejected, but only momentarily, when I can’t get the fifth vote for something I think is very important. But then you go on to the next challenge and you give it your all. You know that these important issues are not going to go away. They are going to come back again and again. There’ll be another time, another day. Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.“

ON HAVING IT ALL

“You can’t have it all, all at once. Who—man or woman—has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.”

ON DISCRIMINATION

“I try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, color of their skin, whether they’re men or women... Our daughters and sons should be free to achieve whatever their talents equip them to accomplish, with no artificial barriers blocking their way.”

ON GENDER EQUALITY

“Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. It shouldn’t be that women are the exception… A gender line helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.”

ON FEMINISM

“Feminism… I think the simplest explanation, and one that captures the idea, is a song that Marlo Thomas sang, ‘Free to be You and Me.’ Free to be, if you were a girl—doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. Anything you want to be. And if you’re a boy, and you like teaching, you like nursing, you would like to have a doll, that’s OK too. That notion that we should each be free to develop our own talents, whatever they may be, and not be held back by artificial barriers—manmade barriers, certainly not heaven sent.“

ON HER FELLOW SUPREME COURT JUSTICES

“We care about this institution more than our individual egos and we are all devoted to keeping the Supreme Court in the place that it is, as a co-equal third branch of government and I think a model for the world in the collegiality and independence of judges.“

ON THE 5-4 HOBBY LOBBY RULING

“Justices continue to think and can change. I am ever hopeful that if the court has a blind spot today, its eyes will be open tomorrow.”

ON BEING GIVEN THE NICKNAME THE NOTORIOUS RBG

“I think a law clerk told me about this Tumblr and also explained to me what Notorious RBG was a parody on. And now my grandchildren love it and I try to keep abreast of the latest that’s on the tumblr. … In fact I think I gave you a Notorious RBG T-shirt. I have quite a large supply.“

ON BEING AN INTERNET SENSATION

“My grandchildren love it. At my advanced age—I’m now an octogenarian—I’m constantly amazed by the number of people who want to take my picture.“

ON HER PLACE IN HISTORY

“How fortunate I was to be alive and a lawyer when, for the first time in United States history, it became possible to urge, successfully, before legislatures and courts, the equal-citizenship stature of women and men as a fundamental constitutional principle. Feminists, caring men among them, had sought just that for generations. Until the late 1960s, however, society was not prepared to heed their plea.“

ON HOW SHE’D LIKE TO BE REMEMBERED

“Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has. To do something, as my colleague David Souter would say, outside myself. Cause I’ve gotten much more satisfaction for the things that I’ve done for which I was not paid.“

As Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s body arrived in Washington for the high honor of being the only woman in the history of the United States to lie in state in the nation’s Capitol building – the Rabbi Lauren Holzbatt paid tribute to the woman who miraculously overcame all the odds to become a modern day prophet for the soul of the American nation:

‘To be born into the world that does not see you, that does not believe in your potential, that does not give you a path for opportunity, or a clear path for education and despite this, to be able to see beyond the world you are in, to imagine that something can be different. That is the job of a prophet. And it is the rare prophet who not only imagines a new world, but also makes that new world a reality in her lifetime. This was the brilliance and vision of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,’ she said.

Rabbi Lauren Holtz Tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Rest in Peace RBG. A grateful nation thanks you for a job well done.