Feeling Behind? You’re Doing More Than Einstein Ever Did

This post is a summarized companion to Episode 23 of the Radical Redirection Podcast: “Feeling Behind? You’re Doing More Than Einstein Ever Did.” If you want to go deeper, listen to the full episode below or wherever you get your podcasts.

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The Truth Behind Einstein’s Productivity

Can you imagine Albert Einstein being dropped into your life right now? Full-time job, kids, side hustle, working out, a house to manage, errands to run, emails piling up… AND the audacity to still have a dream you’re trying to build on the side?

I’m convinced he would throw his hands up and say, “These are no conditions to get anything done!”

And yet, here you are. Getting it all done.

I recently fell down a rabbit hole learning about Albert Einstein’s personal life, and I have to tell you, it lit something on fire in me.

Most of us know Einstein as the brilliant physicist who changed science forever. What we don’t talk about is who was behind him making all of that possible.

His first wife, Mileva, was a fellow physicist who studied alongside him at university in Zurich. By all accounts, and there is evidence of this in her letters and journals, she was deeply involved in his work. She used words like “we” and “our work.” She was brilliant in her own right.

But as their marriage deteriorated, Albert started taking sole credit for everything. And what’s worse, he handed her a written list of conditions she had to meet if she wanted to stay married to him. Not a conversation! A freaking letter.

The conditions she had to follow included:

Doing all of his laundry and keeping his clothes in order
Cooking him three meals a day and delivering them to his room
Maintaining his study and bedroom without ever interrupting him while he was there
Not speaking to him without his permission—and stopping immediately the moment he said so

She left him shortly after, because of course she did. (Who wouldn’t?)

His second wife, Elsa (whom he’d been having an affair with while married to Mileva, by the way) became something closer to a personal assistant. She managed his schedule, handled his correspondence, arranged his travel, ran the entire household, and turned a blind eye to his continued affairs (because of course he continued to cheat).

This is the man on the poster. This is the genius we celebrate.

And I’m not bringing this up just to be outraged, though the outrage is absolutely warranted. I’m bringing it up because of a specific pattern I see—and want to talk about in this episode/blog post today.

The Infrastructure Behind Every “Genius”

When you look at the great minds of history—Einstein, Newton, Darwin, Nikola Tesla, Benjamin Franklin—and I’m just naming them off the top of my head, I didn’t look into all of their personal lives—what you’re actually looking at is not just exceptional individual talent. You’re looking at exceptional support systems.

These men had:

Wives or domestic partners managing every aspect of the household
Cooks, maids, and butlers handling their daily needs
Assistants managing their schedules and correspondence
Financial wealth that insulated them from logistical stress

They were not doing the dishes. They were not cleaning the bathroom, coordinating kids’ schedules, running to the store, answering emails, or figuring out what’s for dinner.

They were not multitasking. They were mono-tasking at the highest level because someone else was handling everything else.

These are the names in history books. Wealthy white men.

And the reason those are the names we find in history books isn’t because they were the smartest people alive. It’s because they had the privilege of an infrastructure to fully focus on their work. And most people (women, people of other races and ethnicities, people from lower socioeconomic classes) never had that.

Can you imagine what creative genius the world is missing out on because MOST people on Earth, in history, never had the supportive structures to explore their talents?

THIS is what pains me. This is what I’m passionate about.

What This Means for You Right Now

Our generation and the one before, we are some of the first people in human history to try to achieve big things without any of that support.

Even just a few decades ago, there was still typically one partner managing the home full-time while the other focused on their career. That really only started shifting with our parents’ generation. By now, it‘s gone entirely.

Now both partners work. We share the cooking, the cleaning, the home repairs, the mental load of running a household. We raise our kids without villages. We build businesses in our spare hours. We try to grow and heal and create, on top of everything else we have going on.

The night I learned and realized all of this, I ran to Matt, practically buzzing: “Matt! It’s just you and me. There’s no one else. WE do all of our work, all of our creative pursuits for our businesses on top of that, all of the cooking and cleaning and maintenance—and we are still accomplishing so much!”

That’s the part that stopped me in my tracks and filled me with something that felt like awe. This is the part, in all of this, that felt exciting and encouraging to me.

If you have a full-time job, potentially kids, a side hustle, a creative project, a relationship you’re nurturing, a body you’re taking care of, emotional healing you’re doing, generational patterns you’re breaking… you have MORE on your plate than Einstein ever did. And you’re still moving forward.

You are not going slow at all! You are going incredibly fast given the circumstances you’re in.

Give Yourself the Grace You Actually Deserve

Please hear this: it is unreasonable and unrealistic to hold yourself to the standard of the prolific geniuses we read about in history books. Their output was made possible by infrastructure most of us will never have.

And the people in our generation who have achieved massive success and fame? They’re already at a place where they can hire teams to manage their lives. That’s not where you and I are right now, and that is not a failure. That’s just where we are in our journey.

One of the most powerful things you can do for your confidence and your sense of self-worth is develop a nightly practice of telling yourself, before bed, how well you’re doing.

“I am doing so well. I am doing so much. My brain is full of work and responsibilities, and I am still getting it all done.”

That is what self-love actually sounds like inside your own head.

On the hectic, long days—the days when you have to run to Target and the kitchen is a disaster and the cat throws up on the rug and and your to-do list didn’t even get started—especially on those days, go to bed and remind yourself: I am doing my best. I am on my way. I am enough.

Three Ways to Build Your Own Supportive Structure

Okay… grace and self-compassion are essential. But I also promised you strategy. So let’s talk about what we can actually do to create conditions that are more conducive to the focused, creative, meaningful work we want to do.

The two biggest obstacles modern ambitious people face are: no supportive infrastructure and daily decision fatigue. Here’s how my husband and I are addressing both.

1. Build Your Own Infrastructure

The question to ask yourself is: what in my life doesn’t actually require me?

Anything that can be delegated, outsourced, or handed off is stealing time and mental energy from the work that only you can do. Some examples:

Hiring a cleaning service for regular deep cleans
Outsourcing laundry, lawn care, or home repairs to specialists
Using food delivery or meal prep services
Hiring a house manager (essentially a project manager for your household) to handle schedules, contacts, logistics, and the mental load of running a home
Using AI as a personal assistant for research, decision-making, and planning

That last one has been a game-changer for me. When I needed to build a baby registry and had no idea where to start, I turned to ChatGPT, fed it my values and preferences, and had it do all the research. Of course, I still go over its work and make the final decision myself, but it saved me days of mental fatigue. We don’t use AI for things a Google search can do, but for complex, time-consuming decisions? It’s like having a personal assistant on call.

2. Use Money as a Supportive Structure

Let me be direct: having money to outsource tasks is genuinely life-changing. When Matt and I realized we could afford to hire a cleaning service, to hire movers, to hire contractors for our new house, the mental relief was immediate and profound.

But it’s not just having the money. That’s only half of it. For a lot of us, the block isn’t actually the money, it’s the mindset around spending it. Beliefs like:

“I can do it myself, why would I pay someone else?”
“My parents didn’t do this, so I shouldn’t need to.”
“I’m a bad person for hiring help.” (I carried this one for years.)

The reframe that changed everything for me: hiring a cleaning service means I am supporting a local business and someone’s livelihood. That belief feels so much better! And it’s also simply true.

If learning to make your money work for you and build real financial freedom is something you want to explore, I cannot recommend enough the podcast Build Wealth with Katie Viola. Katie is a dear friend of mine, and she talks about using money as a supportive structure so you can rest, delegate, and protect the things that actually matter to you. I listen to it myself all the time.

3. Build Income Streams to Buy Back Your Time

Matt and I realized early in our careers that trading hours for a paycheck until 65 was not the life we wanted to build. Our jobs were never going to give us the creative freedom, the financial freedom, or the time freedom that we were hungry for (and KNEW we could have).

For us, the answer was: businesses.

Entrepreneurship is an exponential curve. It means more effort now for a very different kind of payoff later, one that grows instead of staying flat. We’re building income streams now, in our late 20s and early 30s, so that in five, ten, fifteen years we can:

Work on our terms: 10, 15, 20 hours a week depending on what the season calls for
Be present with our kids without having to attend meetings that we can’t skip
Do the creative work that lights us up: painting, writing, building, problem solving
Retire early, or at least retire from work that doesn’t feel like ours

Yes, we’re working harder right now than we ever did at a 9-to-6. But this work builds. It compounds. And we can already see the evidence that we’re on our way.

Of course, entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone. The idea here is to create additional income streams that will allow you to buy back your time way before you’re 65.

Some other ideas of how to do this are:

Investing in real estate
Creating “assets” that will pay you royalties (songs, books, photos, digital products, and other intellectual property that people can buy/consume many times over and over again)
Having a consulting gig on the side (on the topic of something you’re an expert in)
Affiliate marketing (if you’re into that and good at social media)

And it’s not about piling on MORE to do for yourself, but strategically creating a life where your work doesn’t consume you for 40-50 hours a week. It’s up to you how.

You’re Doing Something Einstein Never Could

Matt and I, we are not aiming for Nobel Prizes or world reknown. But we do have things we want to create, ideas we believe can make the world a little better, and work that feels like a soul calling rather than just a job.

There are dreams in our hearts that feel so big and so tender that we want to wake up and work toward them every single day. And the fact that we're doing that, showing up for those dreams while also managing full, complicated, demanding lives, is something that deserves far more acknowledgment than we give it.

And for those reasons, protecting our creativity, our focus, and our time is not a luxury. It is the most important work.

On the days when it feels like you're going nowhere, when the side quests pile up and the real work doesn't get touched, when the life stuff swallows the dream stuff whole… Please come back to this:

You are doing something Einstein would not have been able to do. And that is saying a LOT!

The messy, real-life circumstances you're in do not cancel out what you're building. They make it more remarkable.

Give yourself the grace and recognition you deserve. You’re doing it.

—So much love,
Kat

P.S. This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation. Next week, we’re going deeper into why this is specifically harder for women, and what we can do about it. Stay tuned.

If you’re craving a gentle life reset, where you ease the stress & pressure in your life, get your energy back, and actually find time and space for you, I invite you to do a 90-minute call with me. Self care meets strategy meets ease. Let’s do it!