What are the three things you wish you’d been taught at school — things that could have changed your life, had you known about them sooner?

I’ve been sitting with that question for a while now. And for me, the answer keeps coming back to the same three things, none of which showed up anywhere in my actual education.

One: The life of Swami Vivekananda, and Karma Yoga

I came across Swami Vivekananda at a point in my life when I was genuinely struggling to figure out what I was meant to do with it.

Vivekananda was born Narendranath Datta in Calcutta in January 1863. He became a disciple of the sage Ramakrishna, and in 1893 he travelled to the United States to speak at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, where his opening address made him something of an overnight sensation in the West. Over the next four years he lectured across America and England, and in the winter of 1895–96, working out of a rented room on West 39th Street in New York, he delivered a series of talks that a stenographer named Joseph Josiah Goodwin transcribed and published as Karma Yoga in February 1896. He returned to India in 1897, founded the Ramakrishna Mission that same year, and died in 1902 at just 39.

Karma Yoga is, at its heart, about work — but not work in the way we usually think about it. Vivekananda’s argument, drawing on the Bhagavad Gita’s famous instruction that a person has a right to their actions but never to the fruits of those actions (Gita 2.47), was that the quality of a life isn’t measured by outcomes achieved but by the spirit in which the work itself is done. Do the work fully. Release your grip on how it turns out. That’s the discipline.

I won’t pretend I fully live this. But encountering that idea — that your worth isn’t contingent on results you can’t fully control — gave me something I hadn’t found anywhere else at that point: a sense of purpose that didn’t collapse every time an outcome didn’t go my way.

And here’s what stays with me: for a thinker this central to modern Indian thought — someone whose birthday is marked as National Youth Day, whose Chicago address is still taught in comparative religion courses around the world — he was barely a footnote in my own school textbooks.

Two: Swabhava and Swadharma

The second thing comes from the Bhagavad Gita as well, from its eighteenth chapter.

Swabhava is your intrinsic nature — the particular mix of temperament, inclination, and aptitude you were built with. Swadharma is the duty, the role, the path that flows naturally from that nature. Not the path someone else thinks you should take. Not the path that looks most impressive. The one that actually fits who you are.

The Gita is remarkably direct about this. In chapter 18, verse 47, Krishna tells Arjuna that it is better to imperfectly follow one’s own dharma than to perfectly imitate someone else’s — and that acting in accordance with your own nature carries no fault, even when it’s flawed (a related formulation appears earlier too, in 3.35). A few verses earlier, in 18.41 through 18.44, the text describes how different temperaments naturally incline toward different kinds of work — not as a rigid caste prescription to be read literally in the modern world, but as a genuinely useful idea underneath it: people are wired differently, and trying to force everyone through the same narrow definition of success is a category error.

I think about how much of modern education — and modern career advice — runs in the opposite direction. Pick the prestigious path. Follow the template. Optimize for the outcome everyone agrees is impressive. Almost none of it starts from the question the Gita starts from: what is your actual nature, and what work genuinely flows from it?

I don’t think this is a minor idea. I think it’s one of the most important things a young person could be taught — early, and taught well — before a decade of external pressure teaches them to ignore their own nature entirely. It deserves to be central to how we think about education, not a footnote in a philosophy elective nobody takes.

Three: Meditation

The third thing is meditation — and I mean the plain, undramatic version of it, not the version that gets caricatured. Not sitting cross-legged, chanting, performing serenity. Just the practice of noticing where your mind has gone, and gently bringing it back to the present moment. Again. And again. And again.

This isn’t just a spiritual claim anymore — it’s a reasonably well-studied one. A review of the research by the American Psychological Association found that mindfulness-based approaches show real, measurable effects on reducing stress, anxiety, and depression, and that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy in particular has shown significant success in reducing relapse for people with recurrent depression (American Psychological Association, 2019).

But for me, the case for it isn’t really the research. It’s that meditation carried me through some of the hardest points in my life — points where very little else did. Not by making the difficulty disappear, but by giving me a way to be present with my own mind without being at its mercy. That’s a skill. Like any skill, it can be taught. And like most genuinely useful skills, it wasn’t taught to me until I went looking for it myself, well into adulthood.

Why this matters

None of these three things were part of my formal education. All three shaped my life more than most of what was.

I don’t think this is a coincidence, and I don’t think it’s unique to me. A curriculum built entirely around measurable outcomes — grades, ranks, placements — will always struggle to make room for ideas like these, because none of them are easily testable. But “easily testable” and “actually important” have never been the same thing.

If I had to make one argument today, it would be this: alongside the syllabus, there is a case for teaching people who they are, what they’re actually suited for, and how to sit with their own minds. Those aren’t soft add-ons to a real education. For a lot of us, they end up being the entire foundation everything else stands on.

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References

American Psychological Association. (2019, October 30). Mindfulness meditation: A research-proven way to reduce stress. https://www.apa.org/topics/mindfulness/meditation

Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 47; Chapter 3, Verse 35; Chapter 18, Verses 41–44, 47.

Vivekananda, S. (1896). Karma Yoga. Longmans, Green, and Co. (Lectures delivered New York, December 1895–January 1896; transcribed by Joseph Josiah Goodwin.)