The discovery of gravitational waves was one of the most spectacular breakthroughs in physics ever. How are such breakthroughs achieved? The path to this discovery was neither a linear progress nor a sudden paradigm shift, but the result of a long-term transformation of knowledge with many surprising twists and detours. General relativity, from its inception to its current advances, was not just the work of a single genius but also that of a community that explored the untapped potential of general relativity, a potential that still leads to exciting new insights and results, such as the recent spectacular observations obtained with the Event Horizon Telescope.