IIT Scholar's Dilemma: Distractions, Overthinking, Stress || Acharya Prashant, with IIT-Madras(2023)

Acharya Prashant

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Transcript

00:00 Hello sir, my name is Rakesh Varma. I am a PhD research scholar here at IIT Madras.

00:11 I have been listening to you since 1.5 years. I am very fortunate to communicate with you

00:21 directly and ask my question. I have never thought that I would be able to communicate

00:27 with you directly. So my question to you is, while I am working on my PhD program, sometimes

00:34 I deviate in other directions and sometimes I can't interpret some simple results also.

00:41 Now this hampers the progress in the project and deadlines are not met, which leads to

00:48 huge frustrations to me, which triggers overthinking. And then it says that I am not fit for PhD,

00:58 I should leave PhD, I am just wasting the resources I have got here at IIT Madras, and

01:08 I am also being paid. I am a research scholar and I get stipend from MHRD. So I feel that

01:16 I am not producing enough outputs in terms of research. And then all this process goes

01:26 on and then I see that my 3-4 weeks are gone. And this runs into a loop. This overthinking

01:35 and all, it will go on and go on and go on. And I have been struggling with this since

01:42 past 4-5 months. So how to deal with this? What is this process which I am in?

01:56 You see, the mind is looking for something that can satisfy it. If you give it something

02:08 meaningful, then the mind will stay immersed in it. But if that which you have chosen for

02:17 yourself is not meaningful or you do not remind yourself of its meaning, then the mind will

02:25 obviously wander away to something else where it can find some meaning. You call it meaning

02:31 or joy or the same thing actually, meaning, joy. If the work at hand, the research at

02:41 hand is actually meaningful, purposeful, then the purpose itself will become the driver

02:51 of your concentration. If you really know what you are doing holds value, you obviously

03:00 won't stray away from it. All this distraction happens because either your research project

03:14 intrinsically does not have value or you do not bother to uncover the value and remind

03:24 yourself periodically of the value. Usually there would be intrinsic value, especially

03:34 in a place like IIT. I do not easily conceive of a situation where a totally meaningless

03:43 project would be undertaken at the doctoral level. So that's probably ruled out.

03:52 It's just that your own commitment to the value of the project has to be re-established

04:04 again and again. Because in the daily run of things, we tend to forget what we are here

04:15 for. The micro things take over and the bigger picture gets obscured. What you remember is

04:27 the lab timings and the number of pages in a particular report and all the little tidbits

04:35 and the trivia. One has to deal with that throughout the day. So that clouds the mind.

04:44 And when that clouds the mind, you just forget what you came to IIT for. And when you forget

04:52 that, then you are cut off from the very source of inspiration. One has to always remember

05:02 why one started out at all. Otherwise, there is a chance of getting lost in the course

05:12 of the journey or just feeling fatigued. You have to remember why you took the first step.

05:20 You have to remember that the charm of the destination holds good today as much as it

05:27 did on day one. There was something about the destination that you fell in love with,

05:35 didn't you? Now have you fallen out of love? No? If you remember the destination, if you

05:44 bother to take out the time to revisit the fundamentals, you will find that the love

05:50 is still there and that love is the source of the energy that carries you through the

05:55 journey. That's the mistake most of us make. In the run of daily life, we forget the bigger

06:09 picture. As they say, operating at a small front, you forget what the entire war is about.

06:24 All that you get confined to is the nitty-gritties of the operational stuff that concerns you.

06:36 In management, they say operations should never be allowed to overrule strategy and

06:47 strategy must never be allowed to overpower vision. Vision should decide the strategy

06:58 and strategy then decides the operations. But we remain in the world of operations and

07:05 operations is all that there is. Everybody is just operating. You have your own operations

07:10 to do, somebody else has other operations and those operations totally dominate the

07:16 mind and then it's kind of natural to forget that all of this once began as a love affair.

07:27 You get bored, you feel fatigued, you feel like dropping out and the kind of demotivation

07:39 that you are expressing, all that happens. All that is the outcome of not remembering.

07:46 That's why constant remembrance has been given a very high value in the field of wisdom.

07:55 It's called Satat Sumiran, constant remembrance. If you do not constantly remember the true

08:04 thing, then all the little micro petty things of everyday living will just eat you out.

08:14 Like a hundred mosquitoes biting you all at once. Small but too many. Micro but numerous.

08:27 Look at your to-do list. All small things to do but 21 items there and in that the casualty

08:39 is love. You cannot have a loveless project, you cannot have a loveless relationship, you

08:46 cannot have a loveless job. If any of these is loveless, then that lovelessness basically

08:56 becomes lifelessness. Am I making sense? Yes sir, surely. So, you are saying that we

09:13 should remind ourselves constantly. Obviously, you have to think of the implications of your

09:20 project. You have to ask yourself why is this project important at all? And in case you

09:27 get an honest answer that there is no importance this project holds, then I'll say opt out.

09:34 But that's unlikely. That's unlikely.

09:39 Okay, sir. Thank you, sir.

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