Einstein wasn't the guy perspiring in the laboratory doing the hard experiments, like, say, Bohr. I think he was the first to admit this. But he was a superlative connector of dots. Another example of dot-connecting was Watson and Crick, who used the tactic to "steal" the Nobel, after Rosalind Franklin's exacting hard work in the lab had laid the perfect foundation. In the case of Einstein, at least, lightening kept striking again and again. He's a great inspiration to everyone that would rather work smart than hard.