Adani

“Research triggered the same feeling I got as a child exploring the mountains surrounding Chengdu with my father, when we’d spot a butterfly we’d never seen before, or happen upon a new variety of stick insect. Time lost its meaning in the lab, and I lost myself in the work. After an adolescence spent feeling as if I never really belonged, I was suddenly certain I’d found my place.”
― Fei-Fei Li, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

“And I ask a version of his question to my students: Do you have a great story to tell, if everything in your research falls your way? Can you see where you hope to go, and will it delight you if you get there? As a woman, the advice had special meaning to me. If I was going to succeed, I would have to do something special. If I was not going to have a successful career, all the more reason to have one in which I explored my passions.”
― Sherry Turkle, The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir

“I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America—the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago—all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my father's pain. My questions were my brothers' questions. Their struggle, my birthright.”
― Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called. Your passion stays low, yet under no circumstance will you underperform. You live, as you always have, by the code of effort/result, and with it you keep achieving until you think you know the answers to all the questions—including the most important one. Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming