I think it's more the things the cause people to succeed in one way force them to fail in another. If Einstein was equipped to with the attributes that would've made him "see" string theory, he likely wouldn't have necessarily been equipped with the attributes that would've lead to the general theory of relativity.

Einstein himself even said (although it's laughably inaccurate) that he wasn't smarter than anyone else, he just stuck with problems longer than other people.