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Stephen Hawking: Four life lessons from a true genius

You don’t have to be an intellectual giant to appreciate the genius of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. You just have to be human.

Hawking died today in his home in England at the age of 76, and the fact that he lived so many decades longer than medical science said he would is one of the least amazing things about him.

When he was diagnosed with a degenerative motor disease at the age of 21, Hawking was given just a few years to live. What we will remember most about him is not that he ended up living for 55 more years, but what he did with those 55 years. And what we learned from them.

One of the jokes about Hawking was that everyone bought “A Brief History of Time,” his 1988 best seller about cosmology, but no one actually read it. But the serious truth about the man with the big brain and the bottomless well of curiosity is that his life was a master class in making the most of the time you have.

When Hawking was given the miraculous gift of unexpected longevity, the world reaped the benefits. In memory of a singular man, here are some of the many life lessons we learned from Stephen Hawking’s rich years on our planet.

1. Don’t stop believing

When the Oxford-educated Hawking was first diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) in 1963, he fell into a deep and totally understandable depression. But he found new life in his relationship with fellow student Jane Wilde, and despite Hawking’s dire prognosis, the couple got married in 1965 and had three children together. And Hawking got on with the process of living no matter what.

Two years after his ALS diagnosis, Hawking received his doctorate from the University of Cambridge. He was elected to Britain’s prestigious Royal Society at the early age of 32, despite the fact that he was too frail to turn the pages of a book without help. After he was no longer able to talk, Hawking gave speeches through a vocal synthesizer.

And then there is the metaphorically perfect fact that one of Hawking’s big breakthroughs involved the discovery that black holes were not the dead things people thought they were. The inspirational significance was not lost on him.

“Black holes ain’t as black as they are painted,” Hawking said in a lecture. “They are not eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole, both to the outside, and possibly to another universe. So, if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.”

2. Don’t fence yourself in

Hawking was almost completely paralyzed, but he visited every continent, including Antarctica. He celebrated his 60th birthday in a hot air balloon, gave zero-gravity flight a try five years later and hoped to travel to space via Richard Branson’s SpaceShipTwo. He even dared to play poker with Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton — on an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

In each case, there was probably a chorus of level-headed voices telling Hawking that he had no business doing what he was thinking of doing, but he did it anyway.

“I want to show that people need not be limited by physical handicaps as long as they are not disabled in spirit,” Hawking said.

Lesson learned, Professor H.

3. Make ’em laugh

What can you say about a theoretical physicist who joked about his I.Q. on “The Simpsons” (one of four times he turned up on the show); made a cameo appearance in an episode of “The Big Bang Theory” that was named after him (“The Hawking Excitation”); and made a hilarious parallel-universe joke at John Oliver’s expense?

You can say that Hawking was smart enough to know that laughter is the life-preserving gift that never stops giving. Over the years, Hawking reeled off quips about sex, mortality and Homer Simpson’s Doughnut Shaped Universe Theory. But when he talked about the importance of humor, he was’t joking.

“Life would be tragic,” he said, “if it weren’t funny.”

4. Life is an imperfect miracle. Cherish it.

Even as a kid, Hawking was curious about how things worked and why. He studied physics and astronomy because he was addicted to wonder, and he stayed that way.

Hawking carried that sense of possibility with him as he made his unlikely journey into the center of our collective universe. And of all the nuggets of wisdom he scattered along the way, this one is as good a parting gift as any:


Twitter: @karla_peterson

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