Was Einstein any good as a patent clerk?
I’m trying to give my boyfriend, a fantastically gifted artist, a decent sense of proportion about the desk job that’s tearing at his self-esteem. We’ve all heard the stories of Al’s legendary absent-mindedness, and I somehow can’t imagine somebody with his expansive scientific imagination being able to focus for very long on paperwork. Is there any evidence to back me up here?
Here is an account which may be somewhat helpful; it’s one of the few references I could find which made more than a passing mention of Einstein’s patent clerk days.
Further to the information provided by Darwin’s Finch, your boyfriend may be helped by the knowledge that, even with the difficulties his job presented, Einstein later recalled these years as the happiest years of his life.
This was because the job had enabled him to marry his sweetheart, he was simultaneously working toward a Ph D and deriving the theories that saw him publish 4 papers (any one of which would have ensured his fame). So his job was a mere speedbump in his life not the whole road.
I think you would be able to dig up plenty of people in other fields with similar stories - from literature I can think of several George Orwell, T S Eliot, Stephen King or Charles Bukowski.