When you treat life with kindness, all life, no matter in which form, in which size, color, or shape… it reminds you of the beauty and depth that lives within you, and the beauty and depth of life- that’s why it fulfils your pure soul with so much warmth, because it reminds you of how connected and never-separate you are to everything around you, and of how deeply your soul belongs somewhere.

When you create space within you from the noise of your mind for the reverance towards the world, towards all life, it just other people, towards all living being, towards nature towards trees and flowers admiring them and sharing their harmony with your presence, when you kindly observe the world with the eyes of wonder and love, you connect with this sense of oneness with all life, and that is what fulfils you, this warms that you belong somewhere you know, that here is your home, that the you care you are cared for, that the way to admire you are admired…

When you give from the heart – when your kindness comes from a genuine place within you, from a place of care and love, a place that senses unity – it doesn’t matter which form that kindness takes or how you choose to express or bring it to the world…

When it is genuine, it holds the power to illuminate and nurture people souls, to mean something and to have an influence on all life, all living forms whose souls need warmth to survive.

When you give it is like giving a little part of your soul, like allowing your inner light to radiate outward – allowing the divinity that lives within you to touch the world around you and to nurture it.

And it nurtures us even more when we express kindness in any form or way, when we act in a reverent way towards the world.

When we give- it is like we remember the depth of life, its meaning, its value, its purity, we awaken this sense of our divinity- the sense of God, of the Source of life… It reminds us that each life has meaning and that all life is united, is never separate from the Source- never separate from us.

And when we feel the God within us it makes us remember that the true power isn’t something external, it lives in love in our ability to live to give love purely and innocently.

Love that we give express speak or create into this world softens our own pain and inner wounds, heals our hearts even deeper and opens them even wider, makes us feel life and its meaning even more infinitely and connect with our souls even deeper while at the same time becoming something meaningful to the world around us – fulfilling the hearts of others with love and care making them too remember within their heart the true meaning of life and showing them how much beauty there is to life. What we give, in its own way, heal life around us, illuminates and brings release to the ones who need it.

Giving to others when it comes from a sincere place within us is the same as giving to our own selves.

When it comes from a genuine feeling of the divinity within us; from purity and love; from a true care for the world and a sense of oneness with it.

Not from need.

Not because we feel that we are supposed to, or that it is expected of us, or that it is simply the “right” thing to do.

Not to perform kindness for others to see, and not to prove our worth – to someone else or even to our own selves.

True kindness does not need to prove anything.

It simply comes from the heart.

Being Kind, Above All, Is For Your Own Soul. was originally published in Reaching Hearts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727)

We usually remember Newton for gravity, but some of his most important work was on light and color. His prism experiments challenged the common belief that glass created colors, and other scientists, especially Robert Hooke, strongly questioned his findings. Newton responded with more experiments and observations to defend his ideas.

Newton was also intensely private. In 1693, he went through a severe personal crisis after several sleepless nights and became convinced that some of his friends were conspiring against him. He recovered later that year, but for a long time, little was known about the episode.

2. Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931)

Edison did not invent the first light bulb, but he helped develop the first practical incandescent lighting system. Finding a filament that could last was a major problem, so Edison and his team tested thousands of materials, from platinum and rubber to different types of thread. After hundreds of experiments, a carbonized cotton thread finally stayed lit for more than 13 hours.

There was also a surprising personal challenge behind Edison’s work. Edison lived with severe hearing loss from a young age. He was not completely deaf, but he described himself that way; by his own account, he had not heard a bird sing since he was 12. Yet he went on to invent the phonograph, one of his most famous inventions, a machine built to record and reproduce sound.

3. Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882)

Darwin spent years collecting evidence for his theory of evolution by natural selection before publishing ‘On the Origin of Species’ in 1859. The book became hugely successful, but several scientists and critics, including Richard Owen and Adam Sedgwick, attacked his ideas. Even some of his supporters, such as Thomas Huxley and Charles Lyell, had serious questions about parts of his theory.

Darwin also struggled with poor health for much of his adult life. He suffered from repeated vomiting, fatigue, dizziness, and other symptoms that sometimes left him unable to work for days or weeks. He also dealt with severe seasickness during the five-year Beagle voyage.

5. Maria Salomea Skłodowska-Curie (1867–1934)

Marie Curie’s research on radioactivity earned her two Nobel Prizes, but it also exposed her to something scientists did not fully understand at the time. She spent years with radioactive materials in poorly protected laboratories, often without understanding how harmful the exposure could be.

An unusual detail from those early years: Marie and Pierre Curie sometimes kept radioactive samples close by, and Marie even liked having radium salts beside her bed because they glowed in the dark. She died in 1934 from aplastic anemia, which is widely considered to have been linked to her long-term radiation exposure.

6. Albert Einstein (1879–1955)

Einstein wanted his equations to describe a universe that stayed still, so in 1917 he added the cosmological constant to counter gravity. After evidence for an expanding universe emerged, he dropped it and is widely reported to have called it his “greatest blunder.” Interestingly, the same constant later returned to modern cosmology as part of explanations for the universe’s accelerating expansion.

Before becoming famous, Einstein also struggled to find an academic position. After several unsuccessful applications, he took a job at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern in 1902, where he spent seven years reviewing inventions while continuing his own scientific work.

7. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)

Galileo used his telescope to observe the skies and found evidence that challenged the old Earth-centered view of the universe. His support for the Copernican system brought him into conflict with the Catholic Church, and in 1633, he was found guilty by the Roman Inquisition and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

But house arrest did not stop his scientific work. He continued writing and completed ‘Discourses on Two New Sciences’, which was published in 1638. By then, he had also lost his eyesight completely.

8. Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958)

Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray diffraction work produced crucial evidence for the structure of DNA. Her famous Photograph 51, along with other data from her research, helped Watson and Crick build and confirm their double-helix model. Yet when the Nobel Prize was awarded in 1962, it went to Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins, while Franklin’s contribution received far less attention.

One specifically painful detail in this story is that Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958, at just 37, four years before the Nobel was awarded, and Nobel Prizes were not awarded posthumously.

9. Robert H. Goddard (1882–1945)

Goddard spent years working on rockets when space travel still sounded impossible. After the Smithsonian published his research in 1919, The New York Times ridiculed him for believing rockets could travel through space. Nearly 50 years later, after Apollo 11 reached the Moon, the newspaper published a correction admitting that Goddard had been right about rockets working in a vacuum.

Many people also did not know how secretive Goddard was. He kept much of his work private because he feared others would copy his inventions, even while funding and support for his research remained limited.

10. Barbara McClintock (1902–1992)

While studying maize, Barbara McClintock discovered that some genetic elements could move within chromosomes. And when she presented these findings in 1951, many scientists found the idea difficult to accept, and she later stopped publishing and lecturing about it.

The interesting part is that McClintock never stopped believing in her findings. When other researchers finally confirmed that these mobile genetic elements existed in other organisms, her work finally received the recognition it had been missing for years. She received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983, more than 30 years after her original discovery.

11. Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976)

Heisenberg’s early version of quantum mechanics was highly mathematical and difficult to understand. When Erwin Schrödinger introduced his wave-based version soon after, many physicists found it easier to work with and preferred it over Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics. Even Albert Einstein reportedly described Heisenberg’s mathematical approach as a “witches’ multiplication table.”

There is also a lesser-known detail from Heisenberg’s student years. He nearly failed the experimental part of his doctoral exam because he struggled to answer questions about laboratory equipment, despite being an excellent theoretical physicist.

Final Thoughts

I also left out a few scientists because I couldn’t find enough reliable information about their setbacks. I won’t turn incomplete information into a convincing story just to make the list longer for a blog.

But that made me think about something beyond science…

We do this with people around us all the time. For example, we see someone doing well and assume that is their story. And we also see promotions, successful businesses, confident people, finished projects, etc., but how many of us really notice what happened before that version became visible?

AND, we do the same thing to ourselves. We look at where someone else is and compare it with where we are, without knowing what their journey looked like or what ours is still becoming.

Maybe we should be a little more careful about judging a person’s progress from the part of their life that happens to be visible.

A person’s final result is only the part of their story that became visible. Much of what shaped it happened long before anyone else could see it.

How many times have you wished someone could see how hard it was for you to get here?

These 10 Scientists Made History. But First, They Failed. was originally published in Reaching Hearts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.