Click Here if You Feel Discouraged in Your Creative Journey
This lesser-known Einstein quote is the motivation you need.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” — Albert Einstein
I remember the first time I heard this quote, I was baffled.
Knowledge is power. Knowing how to do something is the most useful thing in the world.
How can someone say imagination is more important than knowledge?
And that someone was Einstein. Really?
But just like a bible verse taken out of context, I did not grasp his point until I went searching for the full quote.
It just made sense
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” - Albert Einstein
Light bulb moment!
Knowledge is discovering the truth about our world, imagination is how we use knowledge.
- Knowledge is knowing that carbon and oxygen can combust to give energy. Cool discovery.
- Imagination is what caused someone to create automobiles with that knowledge.
- Knowledge is knowing about gravity and the laws of aerodynamics.
- Imagination is someone building a machine that’s shaped like this, moves like that and carries people in it. The plane is created.
Every single man-made thing first existed in the mind of a human being like you and me.
Talk about the chair, the skyscraper, antibiotics, computers.
Somebody imagined it into existence.
It all began with a what if …
What if we do this, and then add that?
What if there was a device we could pick up and dial a number and call someone on the other end of the world?
What if we can use glass coated in chemicals and electricity to create light that’s not burning fire?
Whether you are a creationist or an evolutionist, you have got to admit that a lot of things we enjoy today, we didn’t meet them here. We created them from the power of our imagination.
Imagination has brought humanity so much farther that someone 123 years ago would be so overwhelmed with how different our lives are.
But Einstein from 1900 won’t be surprised. He would say — I told ya so, we can imagine ourselves into greatness.
It got me amped
I don’t know if this has got you fired up, but it has got me thinking that my next big idea will come from asking a lot of what-if questions based on the knowledge I have.
And it doesn’t have to be science-related.
Years ago a lady on a train wondered, what if there was an orphan boy who was treated poorly by his extended family but they didn’t know he was special and that he had survived an attack by a powerful and dark wizard. What if there was a school where he could go learn everything about his powers, and what if while he was at school, the dark lord everyone thought was dead was tormenting him and what if …
And I am sure at this point, her pen just kept going as the story picked up speed and ran off into the distance to become one of the most successful creations of our modern world.
All from her imagination.
We are enjoying the product of people’s imagination daily.
It’s a Call To Action
Go daydream today, because your imagination is more important than the knowledge we already know.
Humanity is waiting for your imagination to be brought to life.
P.S. — I suspect that if Einstein lived today, he would have written this infamous quote as Imagination >>> Knowledge, starting a whole Twitter storm of people in his comments going actually …
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