Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions. – Albert Einstein

This quote from the famous Albert Einstein, one of the most celebrated geniuses, author of the theories of special and general relativity and the winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Those who know little about Einstein do not know that the physics genius attributes his theories to his famous though experiments.
A thought experiment, is imagining a fictitious experiment in your head, and trying to analyse the reasons and establish theories. Then obviously devising practical experiments that prove or disprove the theories you came up with.

Thought experiments is something that can be applied only to specific cases to a handful of fields, entrepreneurship in my opinion is one of these fields!

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

– Albert Einstein

To start, yes the quote is contradictory to many business & startup quotes like:
The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.
Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.
There’s no shortage of remarkable ideas, what’s missing is the will to execute them.

Einstein is not an entrepreneur, thus he did not emphasize on the value of execution as entrepreneurs do! But, that does not mean that the quote has no business merit.
Most successful business people are the ones that know how to plan ahead, and if you examine Einstein’s quote closely, it’s the same idea as planing ahead, imagination is a preview of coming attractions.

Thus even-though, i am pretty sure Mr. 1 stone did not intend his quote to be interpreted in a business way, still he managed to contradict many business people and still be right, i guess it’s all relative!

I will publish in the future, a post about why planning ahead is important for success. Stay tuned.