IIT Scholar's Dilemma Distractions, Overthinking, Stress Acharya Prashant, with IIT-Madras(2023)
Video Information: 29.09.23, IIT-Madras (Online), Greater Noida
Context:
Music Credits: Milind Date
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#acharyaprashant
Context:
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~
#acharyaprashant
Category
ЁЯУЪ
LearningTranscript
00:00 Does the person you are with encourage you to read?
00:05 You have to ask, what does he bring for me?
00:09 Roses or books?
00:10 If someone has a stake in making you better,
00:14 that person will push you towards books.
00:16 Books are what we all need.
00:21 [MUSIC]
00:31 >> Hello, sir.
00:34 >> Welcome.
00:34 >> My name is Rakesh Varma.
00:36 I am a PhD research scholar here at IIT Madras.
00:41 And I have been listening to you since 1.5 years.
00:47 And I'm very fortunate to communicate with you directly and ask my question.
00:54 Like I haven't never thought that I would be able to communicate with you directly.
00:59 So my question to you is, while I'm working on my PhD program,
01:04 sometimes I deviate in other directions.
01:07 And sometimes I can't interpret some simple results also.
01:11 Now this hampers the progress in the project and deadlines are not met.
01:17 Which leads to huge frustrations to me, which triggers overthinking.
01:25 And then it says that I'm not fit for PhD, I should leave PhD.
01:30 I am just wasting the resources I have got here at IIT Madras.
01:37 And I am also being paid.
01:40 I am a research scholar and I get stipend from MHRD.
01:45 So I feel that I'm not producing enough outputs in terms of research.
01:51 So, and then like all this process goes on and
01:57 then I see that my three, four weeks are gone.
02:01 And this runs into a loop.
02:05 This overthinking and all, it will go on and go on and go on.
02:10 And I have been struggling with this since past four to five months.
02:15 Actually to be like five months.
02:17 So how to like deal with this?
02:21 What is this process which I am in?
02:26 You see the mind is looking for something that can satisfy it.
02:32 Right?
02:35 If you give it something meaningful, then the mind will stay immersed in it.
02:45 But if that which you have chosen for yourself is not meaningful or
02:50 you do not remind yourself of its meaning,
02:54 then the mind will obviously wander away to something else where it can find some meaning.
02:58 You call it meaning or joy or the same thing actually, meaning, joy.
03:06 And if the work at hand, the research at hand is actually meaningful, purposeful,
03:15 then the purpose itself will become the driver of your concentration.
03:23 If you really know what you are doing holds value,
03:28 you obviously won't stray away from it.
03:35 All this distraction happens because either
03:41 your research project intrinsically does not have value
03:46 or you do not bother to uncover the value and remind yourself periodically of the value.
04:00 Usually there would be intrinsic value, especially in a place like IIT.
04:06 I do not easily conceive of a situation where a totally meaningless
04:11 project would be undertaken at the doctoral level.
04:19 So that's probably ruled out.
04:25 It's just that your own commitment to the value of the project
04:32 has to be re-established again and again.
04:36 Because in the daily run of things, we tend to forget what we are here for.
04:45 The micro things take over and the bigger picture gets obscured.
04:54 What you remember is the lab timings and the number of pages in a particular report and all
05:01 the little tidbits and the trivia.
05:06 One has to deal with that throughout the day.
05:11 So that clouds the mind.
05:13 And when that clouds the mind, you just forget what you came to IIT for.
05:21 And when you forget that, then you are cut off from the very source of inspiration.
05:27 One has to always remember why one started out at all.
05:36 Otherwise, there is a chance of getting lost in the course of the journey
05:42 or just feeling fatigued.
05:45 You have to remember why you took the first step.
05:50 You have to remember that the charm of the destination holds good today as much as it did on day one.
05:58 There was something about the destination that you fell in love with, didn't you?
06:05 Now have you fallen out of love? No.
06:09 If you remember the destination, if you bother to take out the time to revisit the fundamentals,
06:17 you will find that the love is still there and that love is the source of the energy that carries you through the journey.
06:24 That's the mistake most of us make.
06:29 In the run of daily life, we forget the bigger picture.
06:41 As they say, operating at a small front, you forget what the entire war is about.
06:52 All that you get confined to is the nitty-gritties of the operational stuff that concerns you.
07:06 And in management, they say operations should never be allowed to overrule strategy
07:16 and strategy must never be allowed to overpower vision.
07:22 Vision should decide the strategy and strategy then decides the operations.
07:33 But we remain in the world of operations and operations is all that there is. Everybody is just operating.
07:39 You have your own operations to do. Somebody else has other operations.
07:42 And those operations totally dominate the mind.
07:47 And then it's kind of natural to forget that all of this once began as a love affair.
08:00 You get bored, you feel fatigued, you feel like dropping out.
08:05 The kind of demotivation that you are expressing, all that happens.
08:12 All that is the outcome of not remembering.
08:17 That's why constant remembrance has been given a very high value in the field of wisdom.
08:27 It's called satat sumiran, constant remembrance.
08:30 If you do not constantly remember the true thing, then all the little micro petty things
08:40 of everyday living will just eat you out. Like a hundred mosquitoes biting you all at once.
08:52 Small but too many. Micro but numerous. Look at your to-do list. All small things to do
09:02 but 21 items there and in that the casualty is love.
09:10 You cannot have a loveless project. You cannot have a loveless relationship.
09:17 You cannot have a loveless job. If any of these is loveless, then
09:22 that lovelessness basically becomes lifelessness.
09:27 Am I making sense? Yes, sir. Surely. So, you are saying that
09:43 we should remind ourselves constantly. Obviously, you have to think of the
09:49 implications of your project. You have to ask yourself why is this project important at all?
09:55 And in case you get an honest answer that there is no importance this project holds,
10:01 then I'll say opt out. But that's unlikely. That's unlikely.
10:08 Okay, sir. Thank you, sir.
10:21 [Music]