— Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement address, 2005; widely misattributed to Vivekananda
About this quote
हिन्दी में
महान काम करने का एक ही रास्ता है — वह काम करना जिससे आप प्रेम करते हों। अगर अब तक वह नहीं मिला, तो ढूँढ़ते रहिए। समझौता मत कीजिए। दिल के सारे मामलों की तरह, जिस दिन वह मिलेगा, आप ख़ुद पहचान लेंगे।
What it means
Two claims are packed in here, and only the first is famous. The first is causal: loving the work is the only route to great work. The second is a test — you will recognise the right work the way you recognise love, at once and without argument.
That second half is where the line is weakest and most quoted. A feeling you cannot describe in advance is an untestable test: it lets any spell of dullness be relabelled as a search. Read as advice from someone whose own search happened to end well, and keep the part that survives — don’t settle is a statement about standards, not an instruction to quit.
What it teaches you
Rather than waiting to recognise the work, collect evidence for a few months: note which tasks you return to when nobody is checking, and which ones you postpone even though they are easy. That list, not a feeling, is what ‘keep looking’ can actually act on — and it usually points to a kind of task rather than a job title, which is something you can move toward without resigning from anything.
अर्थ और सीख
इस कथन के दो दावे हैं — श्रेष्ठ काम वही कर पाता है जो अपने काम से प्रेम करता हो, और सही काम मिलने पर पहचान अपने आप हो जाएगी। दूसरा दावा ही सबसे कमज़ोर है, क्योंकि ‘अपने आप महसूस होगा’ जैसी कसौटी कभी परखी नहीं जा सकती, और लोग हर ऊब को ‘तलाश’ कह देते हैं। काम की बात इतनी है: कुछ महीनों तक देखिए कि कौन-से काम आप बिना किसी दबाव के लौट-लौटकर करते हैं — संकेत वही है, कोई अचानक आने वाली अनुभूति नहीं।
Where it comes from
These are the words of Steve Jobs, from his 2005 Stanford commencement address — they are very widely misattributed to Swami Vivekananda on Indian quote sites, but the speech is on the record and the wording is unmistakably Jobs’s.
We keep the page for accuracy’s sake: if you arrived here searching for it as a Vivekananda quote, now you know its real author.
