When I asked Padma Shri awardee Sanjeev Bikhchandani what teenagers should learn today to succeed tomorrow, I expected a list of future-ready skills. Perhaps AI, coding, communication, public speaking, or financial literacy.
Instead, he offered something far more foundational: first discover what genuinely interests you, then give it enough time to become excellent at it.
Coming from the founder of Info Edge, the company behind Naukri.com, 99acres, Jeevansathi, and Shiksha, that advice carries real weight. Sanjeev has also been a strategic investor in companies including Zomato and Policybazaar, and through Info Edge Ventures has backed more than 100 deep tech and AI startups. He has spent decades around founders, careers, talent, and ambition. Yet his message to young people is refreshingly simple.
Do not start by asking, “Which skill is trending?” Start by asking, “What do I enjoy enough to keep doing?”
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What Should Teenagers Learn Today?
Teenagers today are growing up in an environment overflowing with advice. Every week, there is a new urgent prescription: learn AI, master coding, build a personal brand, speak confidently, take up entrepreneurship, become productive, and prepare for jobs that may not even exist yet.
Skills matter. They absolutely do. But Sanjeev’s point is that skills are not the right place to begin.
When I asked him about the two or three things someone between 13 and 20 should imbibe, his first response was not a course, a qualification, or a career track. It was this:
“Explore your interests and passions and develop them.”
This reframes the whole conversation. A young person does not need to have their life figured out at 14, 17, or even 20. The real work at that age is discovery. It is trying things, noticing what creates energy, and paying attention to the activities that make time disappear.
That could be writing, sport, music, design, commerce, technology, solving problems, building things, speaking to people, researching deeply, teaching, creating communities, or working with one's hands. The particular interest is not the lesson. The lesson is to develop the habit of honest exploration.
Too often, career decisions are made backwards. We begin with the market, salary, status, or social approval, and then try to force ourselves into the required skill set. That can produce competence, but it does not necessarily produce depth, fulfilment, or staying power.
Sanjeev’s advice is a reminder that the first education is self-knowledge. Before deciding what to become, understand what holds your attention.
The first instruction is not to chase a trend, but to identify and develop a real interest.
For parents and educators, this is equally important. The role is not to manufacture a perfect child with a perfect résumé. It is to create room for curiosity, experimentation, mistakes, and changing one's mind.
At this stage of life, breadth is not distraction. Often, breadth is how direction is found.
Explore Your Interests First
The word Sanjeev kept returning to was explore. That matters because exploration is active. It is not passive waiting for a magical passion to appear.
He described the process in wonderfully unpolished terms: keep dabbling, drifting, exploring, and trying different things. There is wisdom in that. Not every experiment has to become a profession. Some interests will fade. Some will be enjoyable but remain hobbies. A few will endure.
The point is to give yourself enough real experience to tell the difference.
Thinking endlessly about a future career does not necessarily produce clarity. Experience does. A person may imagine they would enjoy public speaking but discover they prefer research. Someone may assume coding is their path, then find their real interest lies in product thinking or business. Another may be drawn to entrepreneurship but discover that they love building teams inside an organisation.
Clarity rarely arrives before action. It comes from encountering the work itself.
The Explore to Excellence Framework
I took Sanjeev’s insight as a simple career framework. It is not a shortcut, and it is not a rigid roadmap. It is a more human sequence for building a meaningful future.
Stage | What to do | What it reveals |
|---|---|---|
1. Explore | Try different interests without demanding an immediate answer. | What naturally attracts your attention. |
2. Notice | Identify the work you return to willingly. | What you genuinely enjoy. |
3. Commit Time | Practise, learn, and stay with it long enough to improve. | Whether interest can become ability. |
4. Become Excellent | Build depth through repeated effort. | Capability that stands out. |
5. Find Opportunity | Allow opportunities to emerge around real excellence. | A path that has both skill and meaning. |
This sequence is important because it reverses the conventional pressure. The usual approach is: identify the opportunity, choose the skill, and push the child into it. Sanjeev’s approach is: discover the interest, spend time on it, become good, and let opportunity follow.
That is a much more durable foundation for a career.
In my wider conversations on the Indian startup ecosystem with Sanjeev Bikhchandani, one theme consistently stands out: lasting outcomes come from patient, long-term thinking. This career advice carries the same philosophy. Do not optimise too early for a narrow outcome. Build the person first.
There is also a practical benefit. When someone likes what they are doing, they spend more time doing it. They read more, practise more, observe more closely, and recover faster from setbacks. What looks like discipline from outside often begins as genuine interest on the inside.
“If you do what you love, you will love what you do.”
That line is not an argument for avoiding difficult work. Anything worth becoming good at includes repetition, confusion, and frustration. Rather, it explains why some people persist through those difficult phases. The work has a deeper pull.
Stop Following a Cookie-Cutter Path
One of the strongest parts of this conversation was Sanjeev’s warning against treating children as projects that need to be standardised.
There is a common parental instinct to plan every developmental milestone. “My child must learn public speaking in Class 4.” “My child should be confident by Class 7.” “My child must take this course because every other child is taking it.”
Sanjeev pushed back firmly on this mindset.
“Don’t use a cookie-cutter approach.”
Not every child should fit into the same box. Confidence, especially, cannot be installed like a software upgrade. It develops through life, through trying, through conversations, through small risks, through learning what one is capable of doing.
There is a difference between offering exposure and imposing an identity. Exposure says, “Here are many possibilities. Try them.” Imposition says, “This is the path you must follow because I have decided it is essential.”
The first helps a young person develop agency. The second can create anxiety, resistance, or a dependence on external approval.
This does not mean teenagers should have no structure. It means structure should support discovery rather than replace it. Encourage effort. Encourage curiosity. Encourage responsibility. But do not confuse a carefully packed calendar with meaningful growth.
As Sanjeev put it, allow them to be. A young person will grow in confidence through life when they are allowed to engage with life.
The most useful question for a parent, mentor, or teacher is therefore not, “Which skill should this person learn next?” It may be, “What have they been drawn to lately?” Followed by, “How can I help them go a little deeper?”
That shift changes the relationship from control to support.
Excellence Follows Passion
Here is the heart of Sanjeev Bikhchandani’s message: passion alone is not the destination. It is the engine that makes sustained effort possible.
When a person loves what they do, work does not always become easy, but it becomes easier to return to. They spend enough time with it. They develop judgment. They notice patterns others miss. They become better.
And that is where excellence comes from.
Sustained time on meaningful work is the bridge between interest and excellence.
The progression is beautifully direct:
Find something you genuinely enjoy.
Keep doing it long enough to develop depth.
Become excellent through time and effort.
Allow opportunities to open up around that excellence.
This is why chasing skills in isolation can become a trap. A skill learned purely because it is fashionable may help temporarily, but it may not hold attention long enough for someone to become truly outstanding. The world has many competent people. Excellence is rarer because excellence requires sustained engagement.
Sanjeev made another striking distinction when I asked whether excellence itself can be learned. His answer was clear:
“We don’t teach excellence. It comes.”
That does not dismiss teaching, coaching, or formal education. They are valuable. But they cannot manufacture the inner commitment that causes a person to keep refining their craft. Excellence is an outcome of repeated, willing engagement with something that matters to you.
Excellence is not a checklist item. It emerges when interest, effort, and time meet.
For teenagers, young professionals, and parents, this may be the most liberating takeaway of all. You do not need a perfect answer today. You do not need to copy somebody else’s route. You do not need to collect every fashionable skill out of fear.
You need the courage to explore, the patience to stay with what feels meaningful, and the willingness to become good at it.
Skills will be acquired along the way. Confidence will grow through experience. Opportunities will appear when capability becomes visible. But the starting point is simple: do what you love, and learn to love the work required to do it well.
I am Saurabh Agrawal and we come with a new episode on Dilse omni talks every fortnight and cover different aspect of omnichannel with amazing speakers.
This article was created from the learnings from the video Why Skills Alone Won't Make You Successful | Sanjeev Bikhchandani | Dilse Omni.
