Becoming What You Learn: The Journey Beyond Achievement
Achievement is often misunderstood. Most people chase it as if it is something outside themselves—a title, a certificate, a recognition. But achievement is not something you reach. Achievement is something you become.
The more you learn about something, the more you become it. The more you try to understand me, the more you slowly become me. That is achievement. That is mastery.
If you want to be a businessman, it is not just about knowing numbers or markets. The more you study, the more you live it, the more you become the business itself. That is mastery over a dimension. That is what a master’s degree really signifies: not that the world sees you as learned, but that you have become the dimension you studied.
I remember a time after completing my neurology residency. My family wanted me in a hospital, but I found myself sitting in my aunty’s small shop. People knew me as a doctor, and there I was—dispensing medicine alongside gutkha, chocolates, and soft drinks. They thought I had lost it. But what I considered a random exploration became the foundation of my research in neurology. Why? Because in the stillness between serving customers, I could observe life itself—the human system, human behavior, human consciousness.
One person behaved one way in the hospital, another way in the shop. I was witnessing life in its many layers, seeing the subtlety of human mind, the shifts of personality across situations. And in that simple shop, I began to see the human system as it is—not through textbooks, not through theories, but directly, with my own eyes.
Before this, I wandered across life’s dimensions. You would have seen me applying for a security guard job after MBBS, then learning to cultivate rice, working with water purification, the fire department (yes, my family was on fire seeing me!), and finally with space science. What I experienced there cannot be captured in words.
Books cannot give this knowledge. They are the experiences of one person, filtered through their mind. I never wanted to see life through someone else’s eyes. Reading through another lens is mere imitation. I wanted raw, direct life. That is why even medicine did not fascinate me in the beginning. I did not want to be a “good doctor” by someone else’s standard—I wanted to experience the absurdities and brilliance of the system firsthand. Maggots in research, prescriptions for humans—I wanted to see it all, to understand life’s intricacies myself.
When I grew tired of the system, I created my own medicine. Today, it is recognized under space medicine—Shoonya, in a sense. My medicine, my technologies, my way of observing life, my understanding of the human system—it is all mine. Anatomy, physiology, biochemistry—they helped me see deeper, but they are not life. They are tools to see life, not to create it.
The truth is simple: life must be lived, experienced, observed. The more dimensions you engage with—breath, labor, exploration, silence—the more fully you become them. This is not learning. This is becoming.
If you wish to achieve anything, do not chase it. Live it. Learn it deeply. Become it. That is the essence of mastery. That is the essence of life.
In A Nutshell
The Art of Living What You Learn
As you truly learn about something, you do not merely know it — you become it. The more you try to understand me, the more you start becoming me. That, my friends, is achievement. Not something you reach outside; achievement is something you become within.
Suppose you want to be a businessman. The more you understand the shape, the size, the rhythms of business, the more you start being the business itself. That is mastery over a certain dimension of life. When someone holds a master’s degree, what they are really saying is: “I have become this, over this particular dimension.” People recognize mastery, not because you tell them, but because your being resonates with it.
I remember a time after my neurology residency. My family wanted me to be in a hospital, to be seen there as a doctor. And yet, I found myself sitting in my aunty’s shop. People there knew me as a doctor, and there I was — giving medicine, gutkha, chocolate, drinks… (Yes, it looked ridiculous!) People thought I had lost my way.
But to my amazement, what I thought of as some random exploration became the foundation of my neurology research. I started observing human behavior, seeing it from multiple perspectives. One person would behave one way with me in the hospital, and completely differently in the shop. I was involved in all sorts of activities.
In those early days, you might have seen me applying for a job as a security guard after passing MBBS. Then I worked as a farmer, learning the cultivation of rice. I spent long, deep hours in the fields. Then with water resources, studying purification. Then with the fire department — which, of course, made everyone at home exclaim, “What on earth is he doing?!” (Hahhaa.) And then, I worked with space science.
What I experienced in these explorations cannot be articulated fully in words. Books cannot give this. Books are written from the deadliest experiences of a single author, filtered through their mind. But I did not want someone else’s experience — I wanted my own. Reading life through someone else’s eyes is, frankly, foolishness.
Even when I was studying medicine, I was not fascinated by the subject itself, because it was written by someone else. I studied it not to become a better doctor, but to see what kind of absurd research they were doing — maggots here, guinea pigs there, and somehow giving medicine to humans. That is what I wanted to understand. The system exhausted me, and then I opened my own way of medicine — now recognized under the banner of space medicine, Shoonya in some ways.
I have my own medicine, my own technologies, my own way of taking history, my own way of seeing life. Anatomy, physiology, biochemistry — yes, they helped me go deeper, but they are not the destination. They cannot reach life itself. They cannot cure. Life is not understood through books, through other minds, through formulas. Life is understood by being involved with it, in its raw, infinite variety.
And that is the essence: as I engaged with different dimensions of life, as I learned from each experience, slowly, inevitably, I became them.
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