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A small hand written note was auctioned this week in Jerusalem, and was expected to fetch between $5 and $8,000 dollars. To everyone’s astonishment it went for over 1 and a half million. The note was short, on generic hotel notepaper from the Imperial Hotel Tokyo, and was written in 1922 in lieu of a tip for a hotel worker by the guest who wrote it. The note wasn’t an IOU; the guest wrote this. "a quiet and modest life brings more joy than a pursuit of success bound with constant unrest." Albert Einstein wrote this note to a courier, not long after he had been told he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for physics. Even today, the name Einstein is a byword for genius. We use it defensively – “I’m not Einstein” we say – when some flaw in our logic is exposed or when we have come to the edge of what we can understand. His ability to see what baffled previous generations is for those of us who are not scientists, exhilarating. And it’s this symbolic meaning of Einstein that struck me as I thought about this note, written in a moment for an anonymous courier when Einstein was far from home. His subject was not physics – but joy. That’s what he chose to say in that transient moment in a hotel lobby. He wrote about joy. A lot is said these days about the opposition between science and faith. That logic trumps belief in a way that is final, triumphant and conclusive. But this great scientist himself, just before he died, even spoke of God. He wrote to a friend; "If God has created the world his primary worry was certainly not to make its understanding easy for us." He seemed to value not just the pursuit of knowledge, which is what he is famous for, but the wonder of living and the endless questions that raises. From this I learn that my struggle to know more, mostly reveals to me the true extent of what I don’t know. And as I accept this, so my wonder deepens, my sense of adventure intensifies and the world becomes not a less but a more mysterious place. For someone as distinguished as Einstein to say that the pursuit of success, in his words, doesn’t bring joy, is a voice from the frontline of intellectual endeavour. And in a world obsessed by success, it’s hard to put into practice. But as Einstein also wrote in his own hand, in another note auctioned at the same time: where there is a will, there is a way.