[aroundtown]

Like other PG posts, I feel like he misses the elephant in the room, opportunity. You can be intelligent or highly creative, but unless you have the opportunity to use your abilities in some fashion, neither will do you much good.

Like so many others like him, they probably miss opportunity being such a big deal because it was so abundant for them. This is not to say they didn't also have to be intelligent and work hard to get where they are, but they also had to have things align for them in their life, that were outside their control, to get where they are.

[randcraw]

I think emphasizing opportunity is putting the cart before the horse. I believe opportunity follows from initiative, imagination, and boldly asking and exploring great questions.

Game-changers like Einstein differ from other geniuses like Oppenheimer by asking imaginative questions and then independently exploring even when they lead to weird disruptive implications like warped space and time. Einstein never waited to be invited to the party. He created his own.

[aroundtown]

Without opportunity there is no cart, nor horse, nor road to travel on.

Einstein was fortunate to be born into a family that was educated and well off enough to afford him to study. (Same with Oppenheimer and I'd reason most celebrated intellects) Had Einstein been born in the son of former slaves in the US South, he never would have been allowed to study math or physics, he likely wouldn't have been able to escape his situation as a farmer, and some other scientist would have had to figure out relativity. All of that is opportunity.