This post is sparked by a few different things: a comment on ‘Breathe’ a little while ago, where a parent asked what I planned to do with my writing; Justin Pike and Dan Grayson both departing Tufts for their next steps, and a summer in which I have been privileged to fully realize a vision that will drive me forward for the foreseeable future.
In order to illustrate everything I’ve learned about success and failure and choosing a path, I’m going to tell a personal story.
I have two very specific anecdotes in mind for this, so travel back with me for the first: August 2007. Young Joe, all fourteen years of him, has just completed a course in projective geometry at Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth program, or CTY. My parents had come up to Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island, to collect me and my sister.
They had a long conversation with my teacher, a math professor at Roger Williams named John Pimental, in which he extolled my academic versatility. He advised me, as we left, to broaden my horizons and take some courses in English or history.
Then a year later, I considered the idea of returning to CTY and mentioned to my parents that I would have liked to take a writing class that summer.
You know the feeling of sudden inertia that occurs when someone casually says something that makes the whole conversation lurch to a halt?
My dad’s exact words to me, and yes, I remember them six years later, were “Mom and I have no respect for English.” English, in that context,was a (derogatory) catch-all word that referred to any academic discipline that didn’t involve the hard sciences, mathematics, engineering or finance. It was said emphatically, a tone of voice that added and that’s final to the silence that followed.
This is no fault of my parents’; one of the difficulties of raising children is trying to steer them when the world they grow up in is profoundly different from the one you remember. My parents (and I) came from India, a culture in which academic performance was prized, where rote memorization was critical, and where an undergraduate education that didn’t lead to an engineering degree was, practically speaking, worthless. That’s why you see people like Tufts’ very own Professor Ujjayant Chakravorty, a brilliant environmental economist who has a Bachelor’s in mechanical engineering.
When I try to explain that to American students, the easiest parallel I can hit on is “imagine if all your classes were just SAT prep, and that a 2400 on the SAT got you into Stanford.”
So when my parents found themselves with a headstrong, pudgy little boy who was happiest neck-deep in books, they did what their culture had taught them to do: they made clear that I was to proceed in some science or math track, ideally pre-med.
The second anecdote comes on my old house’s front porch in Livingston, New Jersey, in July 2011. I had just graduated from high school, had submitted my enrollment deposit to officially become a member of the Tufts University Class of 2015, and I was so deeply dreading four years of pre-med that I was physically ill. On the porch, I finally steeled myself and told my parents the truth: I couldn’t do it. I had loathed every second of AP Biology and whether I could successfully earn admittance to medical school or not, I would hate it forever.
What really threw them for a loop, I think, was my confession that I thrived in AP European History. They didn’t respect the humanities or social sciences, I said, but those were what made me happy.
And so my parents said “okay. What do you want to do?”
In today’s economy, rife with frightening numbers on employment data, overflowing with advice and information thanks to the internet, one of the worst decisions you can make is the easy one—the one-size-fits all choice.
Nurture your talents without trying to mold them. Amplify your passions without trying to funnel them. Find something you love and cling to it with both hands. Ask yourself “what can I do with this?” but do not list your options by starting salary.
I almost consigned myself to a lifetime of misery because medicine seemed like one of two or three clear paths stretching ahead into the fog that was my future. But over the last three years, I’ve realized success is not a quantifiable outcome.
Success doesn’t always come to those who plan. It certainly doesn’t always come to those who play by the rules. Success is what follows from being true to yourself. Success is the result of true honesty, and failure is what happens when you try to be someone you’re not.
Those who really, truly succeed have one secret beyond maniacal hard work. They succeed because they’re happy. It almost never goes the other way around.
So this message is, ultimately, directed at both those students (at Tufts or not) who are trying to choose between various majors and futures, and to those loving, fearful parents whose good intentions may be doing more harm than good.
Don’t work backwards. Don’t find a salary you want, then decide on majors, then decide on schools. Don’t try to build a step-by-step ladder to your perfect future because somewhere along the way the universe is going to kick it over.
Asking where you’re going is fine, and asking what you’ll do with your degree is a terrific way to keep yourself grounded and purposeful. But find what moves you. It doesn’t need to be a huge cause; it can be as humble or small or seemingly unimportant as you want. What matters is how important it is to you. And once you find it, try honestly to bridge what you can do and what you care about. Let the cards fall where they will.
When building a future, you don’t need a path through the fog. You just need to believe in every step.
I’d like to dedicate this post to Justin Pike and Dan Grayson, who have run the admissions blogs since I arrived on campus in September 2011 but who have both moved on from Tufts this summer. From them I learned the real value of caring about what you do, and the importance of being true to yourself no matter where it leads you. Justin, Dan, all the best, always. I’m honored to have known you.