He was infamous at being bad at math with hi wife doing some of the math for him. He never recognized her in doing so.
https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28...
This doesn't prevent me from kicking the kubernetes can down the road instead of coming up with more general relativity. Maybe it's the lust that's insufficient.
The right person at the right place at the right time -- the time is maybe the biggest one. It's not just Einstein who revolutionized physics, his contemporaries did too
Seems he was in fact super smart and educated at good schools / universities in the countries he lived in. As you'd expect from someone who revolutionised parts of science.
His promise was recognized very early.
There is also a quip by mathematicians and physicists that he just wasn't that good at math. I heard this a few times in undergrad physics, and the proof was typically that while he had good insight, his field equations for GR, Einstein said were neigh impossible to solve, but Schwarzchild and a few others almost instantly had solutions. Einstein was really good at math with regards to normal people, but when you compare with great mathematicians and physicists (Gauss, Euler, Von Neumann, etc), he was probably on the lower end.