His rebellion against authority came before his science did

As a schoolboy in Munich and later in Switzerland, Einstein bristled openly against the rote, authoritarian style of German education, clashing with teachers who demanded memorization and obedience rather than understanding. One teacher reportedly told him he would never amount to anything, frustrated by his habit of questioning rather than simply absorbing what he was taught.

Isaacson treats this not as an unrelated character quirk but as the direct precursor to his scientific method: the same refusal to accept a rule just because an authority stated it is exactly what let him, years later, question Newtonian mechanics and the assumption of absolute time that virtually every physicist of his era took for granted.

His early academic struggles were real — he was rejected for an assistant position by nearly every physics professor he approached after graduation — but they were the cost of a disposition that eventually paid off in a completely different currency.

Takeaway: the instinct to question what everyone else accepts as given is often more valuable long-term than the instinct to excel at what's already being asked of you.