Achievements and Needs!

When I was in the first year (first semester to be more precise) of my 4 yr Engineering course, English was one of the papers in curriculum. It was a class full of guys and needless to say nothing was taken seriously and the classroom was loaded with fun. When material physics, industrial chemistry and engineering papers were ignored, English naturally went for a toss. However, I remember one topic that our English professor threw in as a topic of debate - "Should great scientists necessarily be eccentric?". Even though we didn't have a serious debate then, I remember thinking about the topic once in a while, though with a slight variation. I used to think about the great achievers who revolutionized their field and what it took...

To summarize my observation in one simple word that I'd call the reason behind their achievements, I'd say 'despair'. My favorite lines from the book 'The Art of War' keeps echoing in my ears.

Never make your enemy desperate. Always leave a room for escape; for desparate soldiers fight for their life and it's tough to match them in a combat.

The way I see it, great achievers have been pushed to the corner of their lives and made desparate by the society and back they came with a bang. At least from the limited knowledge that I possess, I don't find too many traditionally rich people revolutionizing things. They make better profits and perhaps contribute to some charity but there it ends. But the urge to do something out of the box, the urge to invent, the urge to make a difference; has all been driven by crisis and helplessness.

Today, I see quite a few people who are not so happy with their jobs (including me) and some of those go to a level of losing their sleep because of this restlessness. But the fact is that there is a convenient working option in hand, giving you the money and the status quo that you badly need and unfortunately we've always been trained to think - "A bird in hand is worth two in the bush". Unless we are really desparate or atleast start believing we are desperate, I don't think there is a way out of the self-constructed prison made of golden bars!