Absolute Minimum

I want to share something I read in the Hindu, an excerpt from an interview with Venky Ramakrishnan, this year’s Nobel Prize winner for biology who said “Do not pursue anything that you are not interested in. This is the absolute minimum to succeed.”

Sounds simple enough – do what you like and success will kiss your feet. Ramakrishnan himself studied theoretical physics but switched over to biology where much more cutting edge research was taking place and had great potential for applications in several fields. The formula worked for him. What about the rest of us?

Today I am approached by a lot of students who are pursuing higher education in various fields. They have little clarity on what opportunities they will have once they finish college. They are equally unclear about what got them into this field to begin with. Sometimes students ask me to tell them what they should be studying. Most of them are stumped when I ask them, “What do you like?”

In this era of information overload, youngsters are savvy enough to pick out a cell phone from the myriad brands and features available to them but when it comes to knowing themselves, they seem extremely unsure. Why this dichotomy? Isn’t self-awareness a worthy trait to have? Are we nurturing it in society? Is there a formula to inculcate such an intangible quality in our youth?

Shouldn’t we match the educational choices of our children to their aptitude and innate talents and then give them tools to polish their skills? Instead we find children trying to live the dreams of their parents or following textbook advice about careers that are not suitable for them. It takes a lifetime to unravel this tangled web to look for that nugget of self that has been buried under the expectations of society.

As the Nobel laureate suggests, it may be worthwhile to take a few minutes to answer the question of “What interests you?” before building dreams of a Nobel prize.