With youth: What does it mean to be practical?

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Acharya Prashant (AP): Alok is asking what one should do to be a good engineer. I will elaborate it, “What one should do to be good at anything?”, now the question means what does it mean to have a good life? He is wondering whether one has to be practical or theoretical. He seems inclined towards being practical, let’s understand this.

Practical is related to practice. To practice something is to do it, ‘to practice is to do’. Now, doing this can happen out of two sources, two reasons:

The first is - the force of habit, the force of conditioning from where the action happens.

The second is - the force of intelligence, when you understand something then it becomes very simple to do it. Understanding and doing become parallel, concurrent, and instantaneous. There remains no gap between understanding and doing.

Now, for most of us what we do throughout the day comes from the first kind of doing, which is doing out of dead conditioning, doing out of force of habits, doing but without understanding. So, a lot of actions can be visible on the surface but there is no understanding.

Just like this fan (pointing to a fan) here. You push the button and this fan…