On Finding Perfection
 

Two men met on an airplane and began to talk. They asked each other the usual questions and it came to be disclosed that one of the men was married and the other man was not. After a while the married man asked, “Why is it that you never married?”

The single man looked pensive then said, “Well, I think I just never met the right woman, you know.”

“Oh, come on, man,” the married man replied, “surely you’ve met at least one girl during your lifetime that you wanted to marry.”

The single man once again thought about the man’s statement, “Well, yes, that’s true,” he said. “There was one girl … once. The perfect girl. Actually, she was the only perfect girl I have ever met. Everything she did was absolutely right on. She really was the perfect girl for me.”

“Well, why on Earth didn’t you marry her?” the married gent asked.

“She was looking for the perfect man,” the other replied.
 

— Adapted from www.OneSmartClick.com


 

Solving the Problems of the Universe In Your Spare Time

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 changed the laws of physics. 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 on as an employee at the patent office. Isn’t that what we all want, after all, to be recognized for the geniuses that we are, instead of the office slaves we sometimes feel like?

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.”

— Adapted from “Who Knew: Outside Player,”

 by Joel Achenbach, in National Geographic