Einstein worked as a patent clerk while he worked on his big ideas that would later change everything. He referred to that office as “that worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas.” That job could have been a means to an end; he could have engaged in the finite game of climbing the ladder, growing a reputation, and seeking reward. But instead, Einstein saw his workplace as a place of removal and retreat from the game he was actually playing.

[Einstein] worked for seven years as a patent clerk, and in his spare time he wrote his seminal papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and the theory of special relativity—papers that turned physics upside down. He called the patent office “that worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas.”11 By calling the patent office a “worldly cloister,” Einstein means that this place of legal business, where a normal employee would go to earn a living in exchange for performing a certain public service, was for him a place of removal and retreat. For someone else it might have been the launching pad for a sparkling career in the civil service. But it is a cloister for Einstein, since in the office there were no hotshot professors to impress, no university administrators to placate, no students to whom he had to justify his existence. It is, then, chiefly a place where the love of learning is put to the test, where ambition is frustrated, where his work has to run on its own power without the grease of seeking out carrots and avoiding sticks. In the quiet of the patent office the beauty of the structures of nature can take hold of him and display itself with clarity.