A few months ago, I attended a meeting discussing the inauguration of a new educational institution, an ambitious project aimed at creating something of lasting value for academia in Pakistan.
The man chairing the session, a mentor whose insights I value deeply, spoke not in years but in centuries. Referencing Oxford’s first conferred degree in the 13th century, he reminded us that institutions of real worth are not built hastily. They are shaped over decades and centuries, often by people who never live to see their final form. “Every decision we make today”, he said, “must carry within it the weight of the future”.
The idea lodged itself in my mind. I began to see that building an institution mirrors building a life. Both take patience, intention, failure and revision. Who I am today is not separate from who I will become. Every decision I make now shapes a version of myself that doesn’t yet exist, but will. That future self depends on me. And while we may share a name and a body, we aren’t quite the same person.
This reflection has stayed with me, especially as I’ve begun to notice how much of our society orients itself not toward the long term, but the immediate. We live in a culture of shortcuts. The Punjabi word ‘jugaarh’, once used to describe creative problem-solving, has taken on a new and worrying tone. Today, jugaarh isn’t just ingenuity born out of necessity; it is the justification of cutting corners and seeking results with minimal effort or understanding.
From slipping a five-thousand-rupee note to the excise clerk, to downloading guess papers a week before exams, to rigging electricity lines during summer loadshedding, jugaarh has become a symbol of success. We don’t just tolerate it; we admire it. The clever trickster who ‘gets things done’ is celebrated; the one who insists on doing things properly is often dismissed as naive or idealistic.
But when every task becomes something to ‘get around’, we erode the very idea of quality. Jugaarh, when overused, becomes intellectual laziness dressed up as resourcefulness. It reduces education to performance, skill-building to hacking one’s way through, governance to manipulation and enterprise to mere imitation. It discourages depth of understanding, engagement and craft. Worse still, it detaches the present from the future. When our goal is merely to ‘make it work for now’, we abandon any responsibility to and for what comes next.
This is why process matters. We often overlook the simple truth that ‘how’ something is done is just as important as ‘what’ gets done. The process is not bureaucracy; it is the vessel of understanding. Whether writing code, composing music or building a road, the steps are where real learning happens. Process teaches discipline and attention. It makes us ask why each component exists, what purpose it serves, and how each choice shapes the whole. When we skip that, we forfeit the opportunity to grow in competence and character.
This mindset shapes how we learn. We see this most clearly in our educational spaces, where rote learning is prized over critical thinking, memorisation is rewarded and inquiry is discouraged. The result is shallow understanding and a warped relationship with learning. The same patterns appear in creative fields, where mimicry replaces mastery, and in technical ones, where knowing a tool is mistaken for knowing how to use it well.
Still, not all shortcuts are harmful. Some are the products of wisdom, earned through repetition. In fact, much of human progress is built on heuristics – mental shortcuts that help us make decisions efficiently. A formula condenses complex problem-solving into a single line. A melody can evoke generations of emotion. A poem or story can hold truths that would take books to explain. These ‘shortcuts’ are not meant to bypass understanding – they are the result of it. They are what we arrive at after mastery, not what we use in place of it.
This distinction is crucial. A seasoned carpenter may use a mental shortcut to size a piece of wood because he has cut a thousand before. A student who copies a solved answer without understanding the problem does something very different. In one case, a shortcut is earned, in the other, it’s ‘stolen’; though both may appear efficient, only one contains the capacity to lead to excellence. Without process, understanding and the patient stacking of one brick upon another, we can build nothing of worth. The effects of this mindset aren’t just visible in our institutions; they’re felt most acutely in individuals, especially the young, who are being asked to make decisions in a society that celebrates immediacy over depth.
A few days after that meeting, I found myself in an auditorium in Gujranwala, speaking to nearly 200 high school students from all over Punjab. It was a university counselling session, but the students’ questions reflected more panic than purpose. The phrase ‘market scope’ came up repeatedly, almost anxiously, as if each student was seeking confirmation that their decision would come with a guarantee. Their concerns were practical, but their language betrayed deeper uncertainty: Which field is safe? Which job is in demand? How do I avoid falling behind?
In theory, this makes sense. We live in a society where the margin for error feels razor-thin. For many of these students, especially those from modest backgrounds, the fear of wasting time or making the ‘wrong’ choice is real. But what troubled me wasn’t their pragmatism; it was the absence of any language around what they loved, what they were willing to struggle through, or what kind of work they might be able to do well. I spoke to them, then, not about ignoring market realities, but about the difference between reacting to the market and preparing oneself to shape it. I told them to think about the kinds of problems they were willing to spend thousands of hours wrestling with. And to consider what type of work or skills demanded their attention, not just for a semester, but for a lifetime. Because in the end, the ability to do excellent work is what opens the most doors, even in a competitive world.
On the drive back to Lahore, reflecting on the session with the same mentor from the inauguration meeting, we discussed the difficulties of communicating these deeper ideas to young people. How do you explain to a 17-year-old that success is not a sprint, but a lifelong pursuit of refinement?
We brought up the Greek concept of ‘eudaimonia’, a word often translated as ‘happiness’, which more accurately refers to human flourishing; not a passing feeling, but a state of being that emerges when one lives a life of purpose, virtue and excellence. We discussed how this idea could serve as an antidote to the shortcut culture we had discussed earlier. ‘Eudaimonia’ is not achieved by hacking the system; it is built patiently, by aligning one’s daily habits with one’s highest values.
We kept circling back to this: these ancient ideas – excellence, flourishing and legacy – feel too abstract and distant from most people’s lives. And yet, they are precisely what our culture needs. The challenge isn’t inventing new values, but translating old ones. To dilute form, not meaning and express depth in a language people understand: in metaphors, routines and lived examples. To make the pursuit of excellence feel like a necessity.
The writer, co-founder of Cicero Counselling, is a researcher, guidance counsellor and educationist. He can be reached at: sarangaamir405gmail.com