Studies and friendships should not be mutually exclusive. Why can’t you have friends who have fun with books? Drop the word ‘balance’ from your mind entirely. Balance simply means fragmentation and division: this is to be done, that is not to be done, and I’m balancing both. Joy lies in absolute immersion.
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Questioner: Namaste. My question, I think, is something that a lot of students face. So, like you said, the purpose of human life is to strive for excellence. But right now, I am trying my best to strive for that excellence, to become a very good engineer. But for this, of course, you need to dedicate a lot of personal time as well. But when you dedicate a lot of personal time towards this goal of excellence, you also lose out on a lot of social time. Like time for you to hang out with friends and have fun. So how would you ideally be able to balance it? Because until now everything I achieved my excellence in anything, it has always been by me shutting the door and just sitting all alone in my room or wherever and just working. So, that is not really sustainable if you want to have long-term friendships and all. So how would you suggest balancing all of this?
Acharya Prashant: No, that is a concept that these two are mutually exclusive things — studies and friendships. And that these two ought to be balanced. And that friendships cannot be sustained if one is too immersed in his studies. All this is a concept that you have absorbed from somewhere.
Why can’t you have friends who have fun with books? So, you are there and the friend is there and both of you are hanging out with books. How are these two things mutually exclusive, that it’s either books or friends?
