When Albert was born, his head was unusually large which made his parents fear that he might be intellectually disabled. Their fears grew worse when, as he grew older, he didn't speak.
But Albert was a perfectionist. He didn't see the point in saying single words without context, so he only started talking when he was able to speak in full sentences, which happened around the age of four. And even then he mumbled every sentence to himself after saying it out loud to make sure he got it right. This convinced his parents even more that there was something wrong with him.

When members of the extended family visited the Einsteins, Albert usually did his own thing and avoided the other children. However, there were a few occasions when they included him in their games. And because Albert was afraid they would make fun of his awkward movements if he were a player, he volunteered to be the referee instead. The other children were happy with that arrangement because of Albert's outstanding sense of fairness and justice, regardless of his association with either side.

Back then children were expected, even more than today, to behave the way they were told and to obey without question. These expectations clashed with Albert's individual character, and being overwhelmed by others' demands he often had angry meltdowns. His sister described that during these meltdowns his face turned yellow, with the exception of the tip of his nose which turned white.

Albert's mother was a pianist, and she wanted her son to become interested in music as well. So she arranged violin lessons for him when he was five, but the rigid way of teaching and the boring practising of the same pieces over and over didn’t suit Albert's learning style. One day he got so angry that he threw a chair at his violin teacher who never came back.
But when he was 13, he became familiar with the music of Mozart and fell in love with it. This caused his desire to be able to perform it himself, and he got out the violin again and taught himself to play, as he once said, 'without ever practising systematically'. We don't know for sure how exactly he learned, but he probably experimented, improvised and made up his own tunes, like many other musical geniuses, and soon played like a professional.
As an adult, playing the violin also helped him solve scientific problems since it made it easier for him to focus.

In German there are two different ways to say 'you'. Children, family members and close friends are addressed as 'du', and other adults, especially those considered superior because of their position or their age, are more respectfully addressed as 'Sie'. In Albert's world all people were equal; he didn't consider anybody superior or inferior, and since his teachers and other adults said 'du' to him, he addressed them as 'du' as well which was considered rude and often got him into trouble.

Albert was five years old when his father gave him a compass in order to amuse him. But the experience had a profound effect on the boy; Albert was fascinated by the fact that there was a force that pulled the needle in one direction, and as an adult he described the compass as 'a wonder' and said that it had called him to research the electromagnetic field.

Once his parents took him to a military parade, thinking he might enjoy the music. But watching the marching soldiers, Albert was terrified and began to cry. To his individual mind it was unfathomable that people could identify as a group and mindlessly carry out the orders of others with no will of their own. His parents had to promise him that he would never have to become a soldier.

Albert wasn't popular with the other children; they considered him weird because he was interested in science and not in fashionable things like sports, and Albert thought the other children were shallow because they were so easily influenced by what others said and did.

While Albert was a good student in school, he detested the authoritarian structure (he even called his teachers drill sergeants) and the pointless rote learning which went against his individual nature, and on many occasions he ran into trouble with teachers and headmasters.
He also hated homework which was merely a mindless repetition of the facts that he had learned already, but his parents insisted that the homework had to be finished before he could play.

Most of the time he played on his own, and his favourite pastime was stacking up blocks or building houses of cards; his sister remembered that once he built a house of cards that was fourteen storeys high.
Balancing the blocks and cards on top of each other gave him an understanding of gravity and drastically increased his spatial awareness, both of which, when he was an adult, helped him conduct the thought experiments that led to his great discoveries.

In school Albert took longer to answer questions because he reflected on all possible aspects before replying. Therefore he was nicknamed 'the dopey one', and throughout his childhood he was told what a slow child he was. This caused him to think a lot about the nature of time and laid the foundation for the scientific work that later made him famous.

Another nickname for him was 'Honest John' because of what others called 'a pathological love for truth and justice'.

Albert had a knack to teach himself in subjects that appealed to him, but it was almost impossible for him to learn things he wasn't interested in. When he attended secondary school, he had to learn classical languages, and while he had no problem with Latin because its logical structure suited his scientific mind, he struggled with other languages, and his Greek teacher told him that he'd never amount to anything.

His fellow students avoided him because he failed to conform to their social norms, and his teachers had a very low opinion of him.

When he was 12, he was given a book on geometry which he studied intensely and later considered 'the second wonder'.

Shortly afterwards, knowing that the curriculum for the next school year included geometry (which he had already mastered) and algebra, he decided to use the school holidays to teach himself algebra. When studying a theorem, he didn't look up the proof, though, but successfully tried to find it himself. In some cases he even found ways to prove them that were different from the established methods, including one for Pythagoras' theorem.

By the time he was 15, his dislike for the mechanical rote learning and the authoritarian structure of the school, as well as his habit of questioning things that were not supposed to be questioned, led his class teacher to ask him to leave. When Albert pointed out that he hadn't done anything wrong he was told, 'Your mere presence spoils the respect of the class for me.'

And Albert's struggles didn't cease when he became an adult. He went on to study, graduated and got his teaching diploma, but because of his individual nature he wasn't able to fulfil the social expectations of others, so no university was willing to employ him. He felt that he was a failure and wrote to his parents that 'it would be better if perhaps I was never born'.
In the end he had to work as a lowly clerk in a patent office. People only started to take him seriously when he made his first great discovery.

Albert's life would have been a lot easier if he had tried to fulfil the others' expectations, to fit in, to think the way he was told to think and not to question things.
But if he had done that, nobody would know his name today, and his world-changing discoveries would have remained undiscovered.