Tuesday, December 23, 2008

The dominance of internal motivation

“There are two things about me which people generally don’t know. I’ve never worked in anything, which is glamorous in any sense. That’s point number one. Point number two: I have always worked in areas which, during the time I have worked on them, did not attract attention.

The word success is an ambiguous word. Success with respect to the outside? Or success with respect to oneself? And if it is a success with respect to the outside, then how do you evaluate it? Very often outside success is irrelevant, wrong, and misplaced. So how can one talk about it? Externally, you may think I am successful because people write about some aspects of my work. But that is an external judgment. And I have no idea as to how to value that judgment.

Success is not one of my motives. Because success stands in contrast to failure. But not worthwhile effort in one’s life is either a success or a failure. What do you mean by success? You take a problem and you want to solve it. Well, if you solve it, in a limited sense it is a success. But it may be a trivial problem. So a judgment about success is not something about which I’ve ever been serious about in any sense whatever.”

(Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the Nobel laureate physicist; American;
he wrote The Mathematically Theory of Black Holes (1983),

Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science (1987) etc.)

3 comments:

  1. It is only the internal that is truly eternal.

    Only a human that has fully been adopted into the grace of God through His Son may approach the true internal. It is through the Son that the desperate internal void can be filled...
    Internal wholeness leads to eternal peace.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh Brad. I don't need son of God but God, the eternal and the creator of the universe. He has no son.

    ReplyDelete
  3. To measure success based on the personal improvement might be better. Don't worry if your success didn't attract any outside attention. Remember that God looks at your heart and your deeds, not how the people look at you. As human beings, we are only able to evaluate success through limited angles, usually the angles that can be seen by eyes (this is the human's weakness). After all, success is very subjective matter.

    ReplyDelete