Pursue What You Love; Don't Drift Through Life with the Crowd

This morning I read, in Singapore's Lianhe Zaobao, an interview with the 83-year-old investor Jim Rogers. Of the whole interview, two sentences left the deepest impression on me: first, "Anyone should stick to what they love"; second, "Don't follow the crowd—history shows they are usually wrong." These two commonplace-sounding remarks are things that many people cannot achieve in a lifetime.

Having lived into my forties, I have seen that most people, when making life choices, dare not hold to what they love; instead they weigh all sorts of utilitarian factors, while also growing accustomed to parroting others and drifting with the current. This seems not to be a phenomenon of today alone but has been so since ancient times. Hence those who can truly do both of the things Rogers said have always been rare.

There is a Chinese saying: even a three-year-old child can say it, yet an eighty-year-old man cannot do it. The unity of knowledge and action has always been difficult; there are many giants of words but few giants of action. Anyone can mouth the principles, but far too few can put them into practice. Why is this?

I believe that, in the final analysis, most people lack self-confidence, courage, and a sense of security. They abandon their interests and choose to drift with the current simply because, deep down, they fear standing apart and pursuing what they enjoy. They regard it as risky, afraid that their choice will leave them unable to survive. Yet the greatest realization of my adult life is that drifting with the current is the greatest risk. Drifting with the current means we must spend our whole lives competing, inefficiently and joylessly, with vast numbers of people, living tense and painful days.

Nowadays, over 90% of university students choose their major not according to what they love but according to whether it leads to easy employment and a high future income. More than twenty years ago, when I first went to university, most classmates chose this way. More than twenty years later, when I went to university a second time, most of my classmates still do the same. The medical students I see at school: over 90% have no interest in medicine at all, and even deeply dislike the major, with no enthusiasm for the courses they study. Yet for various utilitarian reasons they applied to medical school.

So they have no interest in study at school, a phenomenon very common in today's world. Yet to enter a state of deep learning, a strong interest is indispensable—three minutes of heat is not strong interest, and choices made from a utilitarian standpoint do not even amount to three minutes of heat. Deep interest is a lasting, unfading interest, the kind that grows the more you learn.

More than twenty years ago, when I disliked my major, I could resolutely choose to drop out; today, when I found my interest in the life sciences irresistible, I could again enter university despite my advanced age. In essence, both my decisions—to drop out and to return to university—were based on interest.

I can hardly imagine interest-free learning being deep or lasting; it is like a loveless marriage, hard to sustain. For many people learning is not an enjoyment but a suffering they must endure, so they can only grit their teeth and force themselves on. Such learning is bitter, because it is a heavy burden and a long ordeal.

But for those who are genuinely interested in learning, study has never been a hardship but a joy and an enjoyment. We all know the importance of interest-based education; Confucius long ago said, "Those who know it are not equal to those who love it, and those who love it are not equal to those who delight in it." Yet throughout history, East and West, few people have a truly strong interest in seeking knowledge. The mathematician Shing-Tung Yau once said that many people who come to study mathematics at Ivy League schools like Harvard do not have enough interest in mathematics, so they cannot learn it well and find it hard to achieve anything in mathematical research. If Harvard students are like this, students elsewhere need not even be mentioned.

However, being uninterested in study does not mean a person is uninterested in everything else. One need not necessarily pursue higher education. Those who are tired of study but interested in other things can perfectly well give up university and do what interests them; there is no need to waste precious youth on something that torments them. When I was young, many peers entered society early; they found what interested them, devoted themselves to it, and did successfully, with cheerful moods and good lives.

When I was young I also believed that learning interest could be cultivated through education; but by my forties, with richer experience, I no longer firmly believe that. I now think that interest requires a physiological basis. In other words, interest itself is one of the innate gifts, not something cultivated after birth. Moreover, the differences between people in interest are enormous; there is no need for everyone to be cast from the same mold and walk similar paths in life.

In fact, knowledge is dry and tedious in the eyes of most people. Among all peoples, those genuinely interested in the pursuit of pure knowledge are rare—fewer than one in a thousand of the population. Looking across all of human history, one finds this is no empty boast. The vast majority of people need only a certain amount of schooling before they can stop learning book knowledge. Only a very few continue exploring onward, and they have made enormous contributions to the progress of human science. But can these people be educated? The answer is no.

Humans are influenced by innate genes in every respect; this is a reality that many people (especially parents pinning hopes on their children) find hard to accept, as they over-superstitiously believe in education. Education in fact only adds flower to brocade on the basis of innate talent; it cannot remake a person at the root. Many people now invest very irrationally in education; we have entered an age of over-education. We send many people unsuited to learning into high school and university, making them do things they neither enjoy nor are good at, as if serving a sentence.

For such students, even learning once is painful; asking them to study repeatedly, deepen understanding and strengthen memory, and become expert in a specialty doing innovative work is something that could not be done even at knifepoint. After they finish school (in truth they merely played for a few years and basically learned nothing), they are extremely weak professionally and cannot handle specialized work at all, ending up struggling to find employment and make a living. This leads them to a negative outlook on life; people in such a state long-term easily sink into gloom.

Twenty or thirty years ago, this was not the case. Then only a minority went to high school and university—indeed even then a considerable proportion of university students were unsuited to deep study, and now this is even more so. In the past, those unsuited to book learning entered society early, learned a trade to make a living, took up work enough to support a family, and lived happily, with an overall good life experience and the interest to fall in love, start families, and raise children.

But now, because of irrational one-upmanship in education, many people who enter university have a deep aversion to study, and gradually even lose interest in life, unwilling even to date. A great many university students have become victims of over-education. Many of our current educational practices completely disregard natural laws and are themselves a kind of drifting with the current.

We often say that many of today's university students are addicted to video games; in my view, the real reason behind this phenomenon is over-education. If they were liberated earlier from tedious academic schooling and sent into society to learn a trade according to their own interests, their lives might be happier, and marriage and fertility rates would be much higher.