— Commonly misattributed to Vivekananda; actually Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement address, 2005
About this quote
हिन्दी में
महान काम करने का एकमात्र रास्ता यही है कि तुम अपने काम से प्रेम करो।
What it means
Read as written, this is a strong claim: love is stated as the only route, which makes it necessary rather than merely helpful. As a description of how excellent work has actually been produced that is hard to defend — a great deal of it has come from obligation, poverty, rivalry, or plain stubbornness about an unfinished problem.
What the sentence is genuinely good at is the warning underneath it. Sustained excellence takes more hours than indifference can supply, and work you are neutral about tends to get exactly the effort neutrality pays for. It is also silent on sequence — it never says the love has to arrive first.
What it teaches you
If you are postponing serious effort until you find work you love, notice that the line gives you no timetable: love of a craft very often follows competence in it rather than preceding it. Take something you are already decent at, give it concentrated effort for a fixed stretch — a few months, not a few days — and check whether the interest rose. If it does not move at all after real skill has been gained, that is usable information; waiting without testing is not.
अर्थ और सीख
वाक्य कहता है कि महान काम का एकमात्र रास्ता है काम से प्रेम — यह बहुत सख़्त दावा है, क्योंकि दुनिया का बहुत-सा बड़ा काम मजबूरी, ज़िम्मेदारी या ज़िद से भी हुआ है। इसकी असली ताक़त चेतावनी में है: जिस काम में मन नहीं लगता, उसे उतने घंटे नहीं मिलते जितने श्रेष्ठता माँगती है। सीख यह है कि प्रेम पहले आए, ऐसा ज़रूरी नहीं — जिस काम में आप पहले से ठीक-ठाक हैं, उसमें कुछ महीने पूरी मेहनत करके देखिए, अक्सर रुचि कौशल के पीछे-पीछे आती है।
Where it comes from
This is Steve Jobs, from his 2005 Stanford commencement address — one of the most misattributed lines on the Indian internet, very often credited to Swami Vivekananda. The speech survives on video; the words are Jobs’s own.
