Is a person's legacy their life-long work, or what they actually got done?

Albert Einstein is widely remembered today as an eccentric old professor from Princeton, a man with wild hair and even wilder intelligence. Not so many know that physics was not his only passion. He was deeply involved in politics, and a tireless advocate for world peace and for Zionism.

When he saw the atrocities Hitler was committing, Einstein was forced to abandon the politics of pacifism for a time. He realized that Nazism had to be stopped. Einstein knew that German scientists were aware of the potential for a nuclear weapon hidden in his Theory of Special Relativity, E = MC². So he reluctantly wrote to President Roosevelt urging the US to begin development of a nuclear weapon. Even the lifelong man of peace knew that there was too much at stake to let Germany beat us to the punch in the nuclear weapons race.

Einstein said that his two passions were politics and equations. However, he noted that “Equations are more important to me, because politics are for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.” Isn’t it ironic that Einstein’s lifelong political push for world peace is yet to be realized, but his equations gave us man’s most terrifying weapon of war—and that lives on. So which is more important in the long term? What determines a true legacy? Is it what a person tries ceaselessly to do, or what they actually accomplish that lives on when they are gone?