Most of us don’t have the luxury of being able to write whenever we want to. Which means we must make the most of our time. Sometimes, however, squeezing in those writing hours can seem daunting. So I thought I would provide a little perspective by sharing an email I received last month from my friend and Bend, Oregon realtor Karen Malanga.
She wrote:
Did you know that Albert Einstein worked a day job and had enough time to solve the problems of the Universe? Most folks would have thought that Einstein was wasting his time, but he saw it differently.
Albert Einstein worked a day job—eight hours a day, six days a week—as an examiner in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland. He liked having a regular payday, and at night he walked around with friends and talked about physics. So it was in his spare time that Einstein defined the laws of physics. And that’s part of why the world still loves him so. Even after he wrote and published four historic papers during his “miracle year,” he continued as an employee at the patent office.
As a matter of fact, Einstein’s job at the patent office might have helped him, since if he had been in the academic world, his ideas might have been squelched by the professors in power. Would they have listened to a young guy who believed that space and time were not absolute? His job probably also kept his mind sharp, because he was constantly called upon to evaluate people’s inventions. This required him to use his powers of visualization and to use specifications and drawings to test the ideas out.
Einstein wrote: “Working on the final formulation of technological patents was a veritable blessing for me. It enforced many-sided thinking and also provided important stimuli to physical thought.”
Even though he worked a full-time job, he still had time to do what he loved most and make his greatest contributions.
Time is the great equalizer – we all get 24 hours a day – no matter how old we are, where we live, or how much money we make. This story challenges the idea of what is a waste of time. If Einstein could solve the problems of the Universe in his spare time, imagine what is possible if we could all align our time and purpose.
I hope you love this message as much as I do. Here’s to making the most of our time, especially when it comes to writing.
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