"Bachcha, kabil bano, kabil... kamyabi to saali jhak maar ke peeche bhagegi."
(Son, pursue excellence... and success will have no choice but to follow.)
If you grew up in India, you know this line. It is the thesis statement of the 2009 blockbuster 3 Idiots. When we first watched it as kids, we laughed at Chatur’s robotic speech and cheered for Rancho’s rebellion. But looking around campus today, seventeen years later, the irony is hard to miss. We didn't become Rancho. We became a generation of Chaturs.
We are exhausted. We run on a relentless treadmill of exams, CGPAs, package comparisons, and hyper-optimized LinkedIn updates. We are chasing "success" with a desperate energy, terrified that if we stop running, we will fall behind in an increasingly unpredictable world. And it is making us deeply miserable. The movie wasn't just entertainment; it was a lesson in the physics of achievement. As a student navigating this chaos, I’ve started to realize that we might have our order of operations completely backwards.
The modern education and career system trains us to view success, whether that means money, marks, or job titles, as a rare butterfly. We are taught to grab a net and sprint after it as fast as we can. This "Chatur" strategy of chasing success is exhausting. You run, sweat, and panic, often trampling the flowers just trying to catch the prize. Sometimes you do catch one, but you are too burned out to enjoy it, and society immediately demands you start chasing the next, bigger one. You remain the hunter, never the owner.
The "Rancho" approach was entirely different. He didn't chase the butterfly; he stopped running. He spent his time building a beautiful internal garden of deep knowledge, genuine curiosity, and mastered skills. The logic is simple: when you build a beautiful, thriving garden, you don't need a net. The butterflies come to you and land on your shoulder. 3 Idiots showed us that while Chatur was busy chasing marks, Rancho was busy building his intuition. In the end, it was obvious who had more butterflies.
We are obsessed with success because it is highly visible, while we neglect excellence because it happens in the dark. It is the classic iceberg illusion. Society only sees the top ten percent: the 9.0 CGPA, the elite placement, the viral social media post, the starting salary. But nobody sees the submerged ninety percent. They don't see the torn drafts, the late nights spent trying to understand a concept just because you have to know why it works, or the humility required to ask seemingly "stupid" questions long after the lecture is over.
Chatur focused only on the visible tip. He memorized the definition of a machine just to impress the professor. Rancho focused on the base; he wanted to understand what the machine actually did. If we focus only on the tip of our own icebergs, our foundation remains hollow, and eventually, it flips over. You simply cannot build a lasting career on memorized answers and filled pages.
Changing this mindset as a student is terrifying. Stepping back feels like giving up on the race. But I am beginning to think it might be the only way to actually survive the marathon. It requires a fundamental shift in how we measure our days.
It means we have to stop asking, "Will this be on the exam?" That is the ultimate question of a success-chaser, implying that knowledge is only valuable if it yields immediate points. Instead, we have to start wondering how these concepts actually function in the real world. That kind of unforced curiosity is what eventually leads to mastery.
It also means embracing the ugly work. Excellence is rarely glamorous. It is boring. It is doing the same repetitive task until it becomes second nature. It is working on a project that fails fifty times before it finally clicks. Success-chasers often quit when the process gets ugly because the immediate validation disappears. But the pursuit of excellence demands recognizing that this frustrating, invisible work is exactly how the garden is watered.
The ultimate goal shouldn't just be to look successful on paper. If you only have good grades, you will still find yourself begging for opportunities. But if you are genuinely excellent and understand your craft deeply and thoroughly, you don't have to chase the market. The market chases you. Phunsukh Wangdu didn't need a polished CV because his work spoke for itself.
It is undeniably scary to stop running after the things everyone else is frantically chasing. You might feel left behind for a while, and you might look entirely average to the rest of the world while you are quietly building your foundation. That is okay. Let them run with their nets. We can use our time to plant seeds, water our skills, and master our craft in the dark. Because if we focus on building an undeniable garden of excellence, success will eventually have no choice but to follow.