Steven Chu on Career and Science — Revisited 2026
Some sub-venues of the 3rd World Laureates Forum (WLF) were located in Shanghai, and my school provided access to some parts of the meeting. What impressed me the most was the talk by the Nobel laureate, former U.S. Energy Secretary, Stanford physicist Steven Chu on life choices and career choices. His talk might have something to do with the location of this year’s physics sub-venue, Shanghai. College students are universally more concerned about career these days, so his talk on career choice was down-to-earth — and more relevant to the situation of Chinese students than the other laureate’s talk.
Although Steven Chu is a Chinese American, he could still understand Chinese students’ thoughts about research and career, because he had long been in touch with many Chinese students studying in America. Steven Chu believes “youth is wasted on the young.” When you are young, you are willing to take risks. He did things that seemed dangerous to the young, like handling chemicals directly, and he still chose to become a physicist despite the recession at the time.
Doing research can make you live a comfortable life if you are satisfied with wearing simple clothes and living a simple life. But doing research and making a lot of money are largely mutually exclusive. He drove the same car for 19 years and still hoped it would be his last. Even at Stanford — the cradle for entrepreneurs — as a professor, he was encouraged by many to start a company, but he refused. He didn’t want to spare time on such things. He thinks the key to be happy is firstly to be able to share happiness, and secondly to have global empathy.
In my opinion, different jobs are not equivalent in their meaning to the world. On average, scientists make the most sacrifices and the largest contributions to the world — this is why I always pay much respect to scientists. Not all people are the same, and not all are suitable for doing research, but everyone can think of a way to contribute to others rather than stay in their little circle. Don’t drown in WeChat or Facebook — jump out, find what you like, stick to it, and extend your contributions beyond your circle.
Revisited 2026 — what I’d add now.
That talk was a seed planted quietly. Without that lecture, the later judgement of “research as the first option” might not have crystallized — even though I also hold a passive shareholder relationship with an early-stage embodied-AI company (YC Spring 26 batch), strictly as a non-active participant. This combination does not contradict “research first” — it is one combined form of Steven Chu’s old line that research and big money are largely exclusive: research as the main axis, business as a passive allocation.
Looking back, 2020-me likely only heard the surface narrative: “youth + risk + unwillingness to be distracted by entrepreneurship.” 2026-me hears the layer he didn’t spell out: training in global empathy requires leaving one’s native-language region — not merely succeeding within it. This has an internal resonance with my current research path (PhD program in EPS at UC Berkeley, working across atmospheric physics, inverse problems, satellite remote sensing).
The line I am most grateful for is the bluntest one: don’t drown in WeChat or Facebook. Five years on, the information stream has expanded from WeChat Moments to X, TikTok, and various LLM-agent interfaces — but the core advice is unchanged: find what you like, stick to it, and extend your contributions beyond your circle.