1984(not Orwellian but Gregorian). Spring season in the lush green college campus in New Jersey, USA.
Two students were rapidly running towards their classroom. Their professor was already jotting down some key problems for their physics assignment. Luckily they reached on time and settled down in the class.
Both of them became best friends through early years of college and decided that they wanted to pursue physics as a major, earn a PhD and win a Nobel prize someday. One of them was a recipient of multiple science awards and the other one was a valedictorian and national merit scholar in school. They were on a great path. In the class, they were doing just fine and everything seemed to be heading towards a Nobel.
When the professor was done writing the problems, he asked the students to solve this assignment and submit within next week to be graded. At first, the problems seemed pretty normal to the students especially to both of our chaps. They decided to sit together and solve it afterwards.
A day passed. They were mostly done with the assignment but two of the problems were particularly tricky. They decided to study harder and slogged hours in the library looking at theorems and fundamentals. No luck at all!
After five days, things got pretty tensed. They were thinking that they will not be able to submit the solutions in time and get graded negatively. Their heads filled up with uncertainty about their grades because excellent grades were a requirement in most of the top physics research institutions. After trying their best, they gave up and decided to take help from their fellow classmate, let’s call him Paul, who was exceptionally brilliant.
Just before the deadline, they went to him and were surprised to find out that he was reading about mathematics and philosophy rather than working on the physics assignment.
So they asked him,"Paul, how are you keeping it calm just before the deadline?”.
Paul said,"The problems seemed pretty easy to me so I got relaxed and read about other stuff!"
Our chaps told him,"No buddy, the problems are super hard particularly these two. We spent 6 days on it but no luck". They showed Paul the problems and Paul laughed.
To their absolute surprise, Paul just looked at the problems for two minutes and gave them solutions on both. Our chaps got really confused and asked Paul for a detailed explanation and then for an hour, they understood Paul’s logic and the solutions. They went back to their dorms and submitted the assignments the next day to the professor.
One of our chaps, who was a national merit scholar, started to reflect and think about his choice of major i.e. physics after this incident. He thought that he had absolutely no chance of being a stellar physicist and win a Nobel. So, he discussed this with the other chap who was his best friend and got ridiculed from him. The other chap was telling him not to do something stupid and that if he persisted, great things will happen. But our first chap had already made up his mind and humbly decided to quit physics. He went to his professors the very next day and changed his major to electrical engineering and computer science. His friend continued to study physics and was persistent enough to later earn a PhD.
Fast forward 10 years. As you might have guessed, the fellow who continued studying Physics got great research fellowships at top institutions and later got appointed as a tenured professor at an Ivy League university at a relatively young age.
The one who decided to quit, started working at a Wall Street firm after earning his Bachelors and started an e-commerce company in 1994.
The university at which this incident happened is Princeton. The company is Amazon and the fellow’s name is Jeffrey Preston Bezos or Jeff Bezos.
That's some great stuff! I'm sure many people don't know this. All our life we are told not to quit, but sometimes it's better to reevaluate our actions and take on a new journey! Waiting for your next article!