Is it outside or inside?

Q: I am in my pre-university. I need to take critical decisions which will affect my future and its difficult and confusing. I need some clarity here...

Hmm.. this is so typical for youngsters, isn't it? If we analyze this confusion deeply, we see that the seed of this confusion was planted long time ago, right from when we were born.

This reminds me of a conversation that I had with the kid of my friend (who is a doctor by profession). This kid, hardly in his Grade 3, was intently playing with some toy and I was asking him questions which I thought are meant for a Grade 3 kid. E.g. which grade are you in? Who is your teacher? What does she teach? etc. etc. The kid was answering back with short and sweet replies (unlike us adults who speak volumes for simple questions).

After a few minutes, my friend interrupted my interrogation of the kid. His first question was, 'Son, tell uncle what you want to become when you grow up.'

I was like, 'give me a break. He does not even know where his school is. What kind of a question is that to a 5 or 6 year old?'

To add to my shock, the kid replied, 'Doctor'.

This incident simply shows, from our childhood, right from when we were in our kindergarten, we have been trained to look around us and let others make decisions for us. The fact is even the parents train the kid that way. Because the father is a doctor, the kid is bought a mini surgery kit. Because the family has 10 engineers, the kid is embedded with one single idea - become an engineer.

This conditioning has been happening since our childhood. Every time we make a decision, we take the opinion of a hundred different people. We ask our parents, our elders, our friends, our teachers, our girlfriends/boyfriends etc. We do all the research and if and only if all of them come to a consensus, we agree on a particular decision. Isn't it true?



Your case over here is also of similar nature. The pre-univeristy period is difficult not because it is actually difficult. It is difficult because we are making it difficult.

Now, why are we making it difficult...

Simple, we are looking around and trying to find a solution to the problem. We are looking at our friends, 'Oh! Ajay is going to UCLA and Stuart is going to Harvard Business School.' Then we are looking at our teachers who say, 'Boy, you are good at economics, why don't you do that?' Then our parents, 'our family has a lineage of biologists, why don't you do medicine?'

The truth is we do not have an opinion of our own. We are not ready to trust ourselves, our inner self.

We do not know ourselves because we have never consciously tried to be within ourselves. We have always looked outside. Once we look inside and see our strengths, we immediately get the solution because...
the solution is not outside; it is inside us.